“Encounters: Conversations on Racism, Antisemitism, and Islamophobia” - 2021-2022 Event Program
The Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem present their annual series:
“Encounters: Conversations on Racism, Antisemitism,
and Islamophobia”
Tuesday, October 19, 2021, 1:00PM (EDT) / 20:00 (Israel time)
A conversation with A. Dirk Moses on his book The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression
Genocide is not only a problem of mass death, but also of how, as a relatively new idea and law, it organizes and distorts thinking about civilian destruction. Taking the normative perspective of civilian immunity from military attack, A. Dirk Moses argues that the implicit hierarchy of international criminal law, atop which sits genocide as the “crime of crimes,” blinds us to other types of humanly caused civilian death, like bombing cities, and the “collateral damage” of missile and drone strikes. Talk of genocide, then, can function ideologically to detract from systematic violence against civilians perpetrated by governments of all types. The Problems of Genocide contends that this violence is the consequence of ‘permanent security’ imperatives: the striving of states, and armed groups seeking to found states, to make themselves invulnerable to threats.
A. Dirk Moses is Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written extensively about Germany, genocide, and global history.
View the recording of this event here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-DefqRB418
November 16, 2021, 1:00PM (EST) / 20:00 (Israel time)
A Conversation with Sol Goldberg and Scott Ury on their co-edited volume (together with Kalman Weiser) Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism
What is antisemitism past and present and how to define it has become a contested historical and political topic in the last few years. Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism, edited by Sol Goldberg, Scott Ury, and Kalman Weiser attempts to enhance our understanding of the phenomena by being both intellectually challenging and methodologically innovative. Recognizing that antisemitism's manifestations are diverse and its causes many, the volume explores the phenomenon's complexity through the concepts most salient to its comprehension in the present as well as the past. The volume's twenty-one concepts include, among others, Gender, Zionism, orientalism, emancipation, and postcolonialism. Leading the conversation with Goldberg and Ury is Stefanie Schuler-Springorum. She will highlight, among others, how the turn to key concepts not only disrupts larger, chronological narratives that often frame the study of antisemitism, but also brings the phenomenon into conversation with a range of other fields and disciplines.
Sol Goldberg is Associate Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto.
Scott Ury is Senior Lecturer in Tel Aviv University's Department of Jewish History where he is also Director of the Eva and Marc Besen Institute for the Study of Historical Consciousness and Senior Editor of the journal History & Memory: Studies in Representation of the Past.
Stefanie Schuler-Springorum is Historian and Director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism in Berlin as well as member of the Board of Directors of the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg.
View the recording of this event here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LKI6lgeGU0
December 14, 2021, 1:00PM (EST) / 20:00 (Israel time)
A Conversation with Esra Özyürek on Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Holocaust Memory in Germany
At the turn of the millennium, Muslim-background Germans had rather unexpectedly become central to the country’s Holocaust memory culture, not as welcome participants, but as targets for re-education and reform. Esra Ozyurek, based on her ethnographic research spanning from 2006 to 2019, discusses when, how, and why Muslim-background Germans who used to be considered irrelevant to Germany’s attempts to come to terms with its Nazi-era past have moved to the center of Holocaust memory discussions in Germany. The conversation centers on what does this unprecedented interest in Muslim immigrant Germans’ reactions to the Holocaust mean for Holocaust commemoration itself and for the place of Muslim immigrants in Germany and an enlarged Europe?
Esra Ozyurek is Sultan Qaboos Professor in Abrahamic Faiths and Shared Values and the Director of Cambridge Interfaith Programme at the Faculty of Divinity University of Cambridge.
View the recording of this event here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCtVyjfgVfw
March 8, 2022, 1:00PM (EST) / 20:00 (Israel time)
A Conversation with Raef Zreik on the Arab intellectuals’ letter condemning antisemitism and rejecting the IHRA working definition of antisemitism
In November 2020, a group of 122 Arab scholars, journalists and intellectuals published an unprecedented open letter – in English, German, Hebrew, Arabic and French – unconditionally condemning antisemitism while at the same time vehemently rejecting the IHRA working definition of antisemitism. The letter states:
“In recent years, the fight against antisemitism has been increasingly instrumentalized by the Israeli government and its supporters in an effort to delegitimize the Palestinian cause and silence defenders of Palestinian rights. Diverting the necessary struggle against antisemitism to serve such an agenda threatens to debase this struggle and hence to discredit and weaken it.”
Dr. Raef Zreik was among the initiators and drafters of this letter. In this encounter he will elaborate on his views about antisemitism, the fight against it and it’s political instrumentalization within the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Dr. Raef Zreik is co-director of the Minerva Center for the Humanities at Tel Aviv University, an associate Professor at Ono Academic College, and a senior researcher at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. His fields of interest include legal and political theory, citizenship and identity, and legal interpretation.
View the full recording of this event here:
https://youtu.be/cBX9XblaFHo
April 5, 2022, 1:00PM (EDT) / 20:00 (Israel time)
A conversation with Claudrena Harold on her book When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras
Gospel music evolved in often surprising directions during the post-Civil Rights era. Claudrena Harold's fascinating book When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras (University of Illinois, 2020) illustrates the music's essential place as an outlet for African Americans to express their spiritual and cultural selves. Our conversation focuses on African-American identity and empowerment, and on anti-Black racism and bigotry by talking about and listening to the creative shifts, sonic innovations, theological tensions, and political assertions that transformed the music. Some of the key questions we shall discuss are: What were the major political transformations in gospel music between 1968 and 1994? In what ways were gospel artists shaped by larger political developments in the United States? And how did the end of de jure segregation alter the relationship between African American gospel artists and the predominantly white Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) industry? Claudrena Harold will be joined by Alon Confino, Director of the IHGMS for this conversation.
Claudrena N. Harold is the Edward Stettinius Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Her latest monograph is When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras (2020). As a part of her ongoing work on the history of Black student activism at UVA, Harold has written, produced, and co-directed with Kevin Everson nine short films, which have screened at film festivals and art galleries around the world.
View the full recording of this event here:
https://youtu.be/9AfdVQiJWWY
May 10, 2022, 1:00PM (EDT) / 20:00 (Israel time)
A conversation with Magda Teter on her book Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth
Accusations that Jews ritually killed Christian children emerged for the first time in 1144 and has continued since. In 2014 the Anti-Defamation League appealed to Facebook to take down a page titled “Jewish Ritual Murder.” Magda Teter’s new book Blood Lible: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth explored the history of this myth. Our conversation will focus on how the blood libel was internalized throughout the centuries, and why, how it affected Jews and Christians, and what are the meanings of it. Of special importance is the topic of antisemitism as it emerges from the book: what it was and is, and how to understand it today? What are the relations between antisemitsm and racism, which is Teter’s new book project?
Magda Teter is Professor of History and Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham University.
View the full recording of this event here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95Cy0pv5cQ8
For more information about “Encounters”, visit our website or email us at ihgms@umass.edu