Baha'i Chair for World Peace Lecture: The Tenacity of Antisemitism: From the Global to the Emotional

The Tenacity of Antisemitism: From the Global to the Emotional

Professor Susanna Heschel, Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor and Chair, Jewish Studies Program, Dartmouth College

November 1, 2022

2pm - 3.30pm

In-Person and Online

In-Person - Prince George’s Room, Stamp Student Union, University of Maryland College Park

Online: Register at: https://umd.zoom.us/webinar/re...

Abstract:

Antisemitism has extraordinary longevity and global reach, able to adhere to political positions of the Left and the Right and expand from verbal denigration to visual symbols, from physical assault to mass murder. Exploring the tenacity of antisemitism and its ability to elude destruction, the lecture will also examine the strategies of antisemitic propaganda, especially the efforts to devise antisemitic emotional appeal from medieval Christian rhetoric to Hitler’s Mein Kampf to the internet. The expansiveness of antisemitism to include Blacks, Asians, trans, LGBTQ, feminists, and leftists makes its danger relevant to all, particularly in an era of democratic fragility. How should we respond?

Speaker Bio:

Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor and chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College. Her scholarship focuses on the history of Jewish and Protestant religious thought in Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and she has brought post-colonial theory and feminist theory to her analyses. She is the author of Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus; The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany; and Jüdischer Islam: Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung, as well as several edited volumes, including Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism and Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust. Forthcoming are a monograph written with Sarah Imhoff, Jewish Studies and the Woman Question, and a co-edited volume, New Paths: Essays in Honor of Professor Elliot Wolfson, with Glenn Dynner and Shaul Magid. The recipient of five honorary doctorates, she has held fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, and yearlong fellowships at the National Humanities Center and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In 2013, she became a Guggenheim Fellow.