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Modern Permutations of an Ancient Antisemitic Myth: The Blood Libel during the Holocaust

April 24, 2025

This talk traces the endurance and permutation of the traditional ritual murder accusation against Jews during World War II, in particular in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union. It examines the ways in which Nazi propaganda exploited the blood libel theme in conjunction with the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism in the...

All Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meat

April 10, 2025

In Judaism, meat is of paramount importance as it constitutes the very focal point of the dietary laws. With an intricate set of codified regulations concerning forbidden and permissible meats, highly prescribed methods of killing, and elaborate rules governing consumption, meat is one of the most visible, and gustatory, markers of Jewish distinctness and...

Withstanding Reason: Shestov and Levinas in Times of Catastrophe

April 3, 2025

No thinker seems further removed from our current preoccupations than Lev Shestov, the Russian-Jewish émigré who, in the 1920s and 1930s, surprised the Parisian elite with his untimely work. But it is perhaps Shestov's untimeliness that makes him our contemporary. Our humanity is facing what seems to be an...

Bombs and Miracles: Jewish Narratives of Escape from Ukraine and Russia after the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, 2022

March 20, 2025

Thousands of Jews left Ukraine after the Russian invasion of 2022, seeking safety in places such as Israel, Canada, Austria, the United States, Poland, and other countries around the world. Similarly, thousands of Jews fled Russia, driven by a desire to avoid both complicity in the...

Transnational Visions: Israeli Discourse on Cinema

April 8, 2025

Israelis never hesitated to elaborate ideas, fantasies, critiques, and obsessions about their cinema and its place in the world. Well before a financially viable industry emerged in the late 1960s, filmmakers, government functionaries, critics, journalists, and cinephiles produced passionate essays and took part in heated debates about moving...

Psychoanalysis for Diabetics: Freud in the Popular Jewish Press

March 18, 2025

The Viennese critic Karl Kraus declared that "psychoanalysis was the disease of assimilated German-speaking Jews, Eastern European Jews make do with diabetes." This lecture will trace what Freud meant for Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews, who in fact did catch the Freudian "disease" in the interwar period, when Freud was a...

Historical Context Matters: Three Faces of Antisemitism Before and Since October 7

February 12, 2025

"Antisemitism in modern history arrives in three major forms: Nazism and the far right; secular leftist attacks on Israel and association of the Jews with a despised capitalism; and Islamist assaults that draw on a distinctive twentieth century interpretation of Islam to attack Judaism, the Jews, and then Israel. In this lecture, I examine key texts of the Islamist face of Jew-hatred...

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