News and Events

Magda Teter
Fordham University
 
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The twentieth century, as scholar George M. Fredrickson has noted, brought both the “climax and retreat” of racism and antisemitism. The murder of six million Jews during World War II forced a reckoning with ideas that made this unprecedented crime possible and contributed to broader reconsideration of social and religious values dominating western society. It also forced, as the editor of Ebony would later write in the introduction to the special issue on “The White Problem in America” “a re-examination of the Christian faith which brought forth the idea that skin color was not a true measure of a man’s humanity.” This talk will seek to explain the modern rejection of equality of both Jews and Black people in the West by tracing Christianity’s claim to superiority that emerged in a theological context in antiquity but came to be implemented in a legal and political context when Christianity became a political power. I will argue that the Christian sense of superiority developed first in relation to Jews and then transformed to a racialized superiority when Europeans expanded their political reach beyond Europe, establishing slaveholding empires in the early modern period, culminating in the Holocaust and forcing an ongoing reckoning in the post-WWII era. 

Magda Teter is Professor of History and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University. She is the author of Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (Cambridge, 2006); Sinners on Trial (Harvard, 2011), which was a finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Prize; and Blood Libel: On the Trail of An Antisemitic Myth (Harvard, 2020), which won the 2020 National Jewish Book Award; and the forthcoming Enduring Marks of Servitude: Christianity’s Stamp on Antisemitism and Racism in Law and Culture. She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. In 2020-2021, Teter was the NEH Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Jewish History.

NOTE: These lectures are open to the public but all visitors to the Bard campus must register in advance and provide proof of vaccination by completing this form.
 Co-sponsored by The Hannah Arendt Center and The Center for the Study of Hate

Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Peace is the goal for every country, community, and, hey, family. (See, we're funny here at BGIA.) In general, peace is the absence of war and violence. Through its work on the Global Peace Index and the Positive Peace Framework, the Institute for Economics and Peace takes peace and peace building further. It focuses on strengths not deficits and individual action on creating and sustaining positive societies.

Join us on Thursday, November 18 at 12pm for an hour long Positive Peace Workshop. In this workshop, participants will learn how to better think about actions and approaches to creating peaceful societies. It will focus on policy, strategy, and implementation. If you're interested in conflict resolution, policymaking, and peace building, don't miss this virtual event. RSVP required. 

Katherine Sorrels
University of Cincinnati 
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This lecture series, held throughout the 2021-2022 academic year, will explore the ongoing phenomenon of antisemitism by examining its myriad historical contexts and relationships to other forms of prejudice and hatred.
This talk will discuss the Camphill movement, an international network of intentional communities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities that was founded in Scotland during World War II by Austrian Jewish refugees. It will focus on the antisemitism and ableism that forced Camphill’s founders to flee Nazi Central Europe, the antisemitic and ableist immigration policies that they confronted in the US and Britain, and the way their response to these overlapping forms of prejudice informed the mission and identity of the movement they founded. Drawing on her forthcoming book On the Spectrum: Jewish Refugees from Nazi Austria and the Politics of Disability in the Britain and North America, Sorrels will use Camphill to reconstruct the larger story of how Jewish refugees transformed British and North American approaches to disability and, in the process, reshaped the tradition of Viennese curative education. 

Katherine Sorrels is Associate Professor of History, Affiliate Faculty in Judaic Studies, and Chair of the Taft Health Humanities Research Group at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Outsiders: Imperial Inclusion, National Exclusion, and the Pan-European Idea (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). She is the co-editor of two forthcoming volumes, Disability in German-Speaking Europe: History, Memory, and Culture (Camden House, 2022) and Ohio under COVID: Lessons from America's Heartland in Crisis (under review with the University of Michigan Press). Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Fellowship Program, and the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. 
NOTE: These lectures are open to the public but all visitors to the Bard campus must register in advance and provide proof of vaccination by completing this form.
 Co-sponsored by The Hannah Arendt Center and The Center for the Study of Hate

Jonathan Judaken
Rhodes College
Preston  6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This lecture series, held throughout the 2021-2022 academic year, will explore the ongoing phenomenon of antisemitism by examining its myriad historical contexts and relationships to other forms of prejudice and hatred.
This presentation will first consider the recent debate whether anti-Semitism should be considered a form of racism or a unique form of hatred. Framing this discussion within a historical overview, we will consider how Judeophobia was entangled with Islamophobia and what Fanon called Negrophobia. We will unpack the origins of the terms “anti-Semitism” and “racism” and consider how many theorists in the aftermath of the Holocaust and during anti-colonial struggles understood the linkages between these terms. These theorists were opposed by scholars and writers who insist upon the singularity of anti-Semitism. I will suggest that the root of these claims stem from notions of Jewish choseness, Zionist understandings of anti-Semitism, and claims about the uniqueness of the Holocaust. I will argue that the assertions of uniqueness do not hold up to scrutiny, make a case for why exceptionalist arguments lead to a dead-end in efforts to fight anti-Semitism, and conclude that the struggle today demands that we be clear that anti-Semitism is racism and must be combatted as part of the broader anti-racist struggle. 

Jonathan Judaken is the Spence L. Wilson Chair in the Humanities at Rhodes College. He is the author of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Nebraska, 2006) and the editor of Race After Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism (SUNY 2008) and Naming Race, Naming Racisms (Routledge 2009). He recently edited a round table in the American Historical Review titled, “Rethinking Anti-Semitism” (October 2018) and co-edited a special issue of Jewish History (with Ethan Katz) on “Jews and Muslims in France Before and After Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher” (September 2018). He has just finished co-editing The Albert Memmi Reader (with Michael Lejman), a compendium of the Tunisian Franco-Jewish writer’s work (Nebraska, 2020). 
NOTE: These lectures are open to the public but all visitors to the Bard campus must register in advance and provide proof of vaccination by completing this form.
 Co-sponsored by The Hannah Arendt Center and The Center for the Study of Hate

A Virtual Panel and Discussion with Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Kathleen Blee
Online Event  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Although white supremacist movements have received renewed public attention since the 2017 violence in Charlottesville and the attack on the U.S. Capitol, they need to be placed in deeper historical context if they are to be understood and combated. In particular, the rise of these movements must be linked to the global war on terror after 9/11, which blinded counterextremism authorities to the increasing threat they posed. In this panel, two prominent sociologists, Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Kathleen Blee, trace the growth of white supremacist extremism and its expanding reach into cultural and commercial spaces in the U.S. and beyond. They also examine these movements from the perspective of their members’ lived experience. How are people recruited into white supremacist extremism? How do they make sense of their active involvement? And how, in some instances, do they seek to leave? The answers to these questions, Miller-Idriss and Blee suggest, are shaped in part by the gendered and generational relationships that define these movements.
 Cynthia Miller-Idriss is Professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education at American University, where she directs the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL).  
Kathleen Blee is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.  If you would like to attend, please register here.  Zoom link and code will be emailed the day of the event. 

 

A Conversation with Israeli Filmmaker Yehonatan Indursky
Online Event  2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
A young filmmaker who already has international successes and local cult hits to his name, Yehonatan Indursky (Shtisel, Autonomies, Zman Ponevezh) is a prominent member of a new generation of Israeli artists who have brought artistic sensibilities and sensitivities to exploring the riches and paradoxes of the Orthodox Jewish community in which they were raised. This conversation, moderated by Shai Secunda, will consider Yehonatan’s personal story from Talmudic academy to filmmaking, the aesthetic potentialities of ultra-Orthodox life, his collaboration with Sayed Kashua (“Arab Labor”), the politics of Haredi society during a time of COVID, and more. Join via Zoom:https://bard.zoom.us/j/84309541838

Online Event  2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EST/GMT-5
While Israeli TV established its international reputation based on terrorist thrillers, it also has developed a rich cadre of programs examining Jewish identity and belonging, many of these shows focus on Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews. I propose a three-part typology. The first type of show establishes likeness, calling for the Haredi Jew to be understood as the same as any secular viewer. Series in the second category argue that Haredim are inherently better and more interesting than any secular subject. The third grouping rejects the claims of the first, and instead argues for a more nuanced look into the darker aspects of Haredi life today. We will explore these three types, and what they say about the relationship between Haredim and the State of Israel today. 

Dr. Shayna Weiss is the Associate Director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University. Previously, she was the inaugural Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Israel Studies at the United States Naval Academy. Her research interests converge at the intersection of religion and gender in the Israeli public sphere, as well as the politics of Israeli popular culture. Currently, she is completing a book on gender segregation in the Israeli public sphere and researching the rise of Israeli television in the global market. Join Zoom Meeting
https://bard.zoom.us/j/84309541838
Meeting ID: 843 0954 1838

Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5

In 2018 Jan Grabowksi and Barbara Engelking published Dalej jest noc: losy Żydów w wybranych powiatach okupowanej Polski [Night Without End: The Fate of the Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland], which documents the range of Polish behavior towards Jews during the Holocaust in a series of local case studies.  The Polish League against Defamation, which has close ties to the right-wing ruling Law and Justice Party, brought a lawsuit against Grabowski and Engelking on behalf of the niece of a figure discussed in the book. This action is widely viewed as a continuation of the government’s campaign to stifle free inquiry into Poland’s wartime history and to punish those who question the narrative of Poles as exclusively the victims of Nazi atrocities who rescued Jews on a massive scale. On February 9, 2021 a Warsaw court found Grabowski and Engelking guilty, declining to fine the scholars but demanding that they issue an apology. In his first public remarks since the trial Prof. Grabowski, in conversation with journalist Masha Gessen, will discuss his response to the verdict as well as its political and scholarly implications. 

Jan Grabowski is Professor of History at the University of Ottawa. His books include Polacy, nic się nie stało! Polemiki z Zagładą w tle [Poles, Nothing Happened! Polemics with the Holocaust in the Background] (2021); Na posterunku: Udział polskiej policji granatowej i kryminalnej w zagładzie Żydów [On Duty: Participation of Blue and Criminal Police in the Destruction of the Jews], (2020); Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (2013), which won the Yad Vashem International Book Prize; and "Ja Tego Żyda Znam!": Szantażowanie Żydów w Warszawie, 1939-1943 [“I Know that Jew!”: The Blackmailing of Jews in Warsaw, 1939-1943] (2004). He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and has held fellowships and guest professorships at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Munich), the University of Haifa, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Yad Vashem.

Masha Gessen is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of 11 books of nonfiction, most recently Surviving Autocracy (2020); as well as The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction; and The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012). The Moscow-born Gessen is the recipient of Guggenheim, Andrew Carnegie, and Nieman Fellowships, Hitchens Prize, Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, and an honorary doctorate from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.
Join via Zoom:
https://zoom.us/j/95175584762?pwd=V3ZmbnZrN2JraFFzS2Z4U2I3NDB1dz09
Webinar ID: 951 7558 4762
Passcode: 308810