Parkes Institute Lectures and Seminars series, Semester 1, 2024-2025
Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust: The Weight and Consequences of Words
Tuesday 1 October 2024 | 18:00-19:30 | On Campus and Online | Book now
The idea that Christianity was in any way related to the racial antisemitism that informed the Holocaust was widely resisted in the early years following the Second World War. Christian apologetics rang forth from the Protestant and Catholic arms of the Church in efforts to distinguish the anti-Judaism of Christianity from Nazi racial antisemitism. Statements condemning antisemitism called attention to its unChristian nature, stressing that the Church judged harshly all forms of injustice and hatred. While openly confessing that some members of the churches had fallen prey to antisemitism, the Church itself was seen and portrayed as irrefutably distanced from the antisemitic ideology that underwrote the murder of European Jews. Yet before the end of the Holocaust century, major bodies of Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, had labelled traditional Church attitudes toward Jews as fuel for ‘fires of hatred’ and called on the Church to ‘submit her own history to critical examination’. By the turn of the millennium, formal confessions had been made throughout western Christendom for historical denigration of Jews and Judaism, for silence in the face of Nazi perpetrations, and for causal relations between Christian teachings on Jews and Nazi antisemitism. Looking retrospectively at what is now in its eighth decade of development and scholarly study, this seminar addresses some of the historiographic, philosophical, and theological complexities and challenges surrounding the issues and implications of Christian complicity in antisemitism during the Holocaust years.
Speakers
Carolyn Sanzenbacher ‘Solving the Jewish Problem through Conversion: Anti- Judaism or Antisemitism?’
John K. Roth ‘What is Antisemitism?’
John T. Pawlikowski ‘Uprooting Antisemitism from Christianity: What Needs To Be Done’
Undesirables: Forced Mobilities in Mediterranean Bande Dessinée
A talk by Professor Aomar Boum as part of Black History Month
Tuesday 22 October 2024 | 18:00-19:30 | Online | Book now
Does a Mediterranean bande dessinée exist? I contend that a well-established genre of Mediterranean comics and bande dessinée have been created and developed by artists and authors from around the Mediterranean Sea for decades. These comics inform our understanding of the historical and social dynamics of the Mediterranean social, cultural and political zone. They offer an artistic way to explore and grapple with the complex legacies of conflict, colonialism, and nationalism as well as the opportunities and challenges of contemporary life in the region. In this talk, I propose reading Mediterranean waterscapes and geographic landscapes through comics of colonial conscripts (Senegalese tirailleurs and Moroccan goumiers), WWII refugees, and today’s migrants. I coin Mediterranean bande dessinée of mobility and migration (MED-BDM) as a reference to a natural multinational artistic project with an educational orientation to evaluate colonial pasts and postcolonial relations between both sides of the Mediterranean landscapes. MED-BD has the capacity to challenge deceptive unrepresentative photographic reportage and journalistic writing and humanize internees and refugees of WWII in North Africa and today’s migrants in Europe. The MED-BD has developed into a repository of visual stories that challenge Orientalist and pictorial archives of European painters, travellers, ethnologists and photographers about southern Mediterranean landscapes.
‘Hummus and Gefilte Fish’
Misrecognition and Divergence in Jewish-Palestinian Peace Initiatives. Annual Inter-Faith Lecture.
Tuesday12 November 2024 | 18:00-19:30 GMT | On Campus and Online | Book now
Speaker: Erica Weiss, Professor of Anthropology (Tel Aviv University)
This talk considers why religious Jews and Muslims in Israel/Palestine have broadly avoided the mainstream liberal peace camp. It also discusses what religious Jewish groups do differently when they organize their own peace initiatives. This distinction is revealing and speaks to divergent understandings of what peace looks like and how to get there.
Child Health across Charedi Worlds
The annual Howard Rein Lecture- Child Health across Charedi Worlds: Following Narratives of Non/Jewish Relations, Rights & Rhetoric
Tuesday 26 November 2024 | 18:00-19:30 | On Campus and Online | Book now
Charedi Jewish families have been in the news for a number of disputes around healthcare, including childhood immunisation uptake and refusal to teach statutory relationships and sex education. This talk draws on fieldwork conducted in Jerusalem, New York and London to un-pick these narratives and show how relationships and ideas of religious freedom are shaped by place.
Speaker
Dr Ben Kasstan-Dabush
Lecturer in Global Public Health
Global Health Policy Unit, University of Edinburgh
Jewish Life after Stalin (Gennady Estraikh)
The talk will be based on the 2022 book Jews in the Soviet Union: A History: After Stalin, 1953–1967
Tuesday 10 December 2024 | 18:00-19:30 | On Campus and Online | Book now
The period between Stalin’s death and the Six-Day War played a secondary role in Soviet Jewish studies. The years of Khrushchev’s “Thaw” seemed uneventful compared with the prior repressive campaigns (the “Doctors’ Plot,” anti-“cosmopolitanism,” and liquidation of the Yiddish cultural milieu) by the end of Stalin’s rule and the later emigration drive. In reality, the fourteen years saw many important developments in Soviet Jewish life. Thus, thousands of surviving gulag inmates could return to their families, former Polish citizens had a chance to repatriate, and the authorities sponsored some revival of Jewish culture. Meanwhile, the present and future of Soviet Jews appeared on the agenda of international politics.
Speaker
Gennady Estraikh, New York University, professor emeritus
https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/gennady-estraikh.html