Join us for a conversation with Jonathan Judaken (Professor of History, Washington University of St. Louis) on his most recent book, Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism.

From the publisher, Columbia University Press, “Despite its persistence and viciousness, antisemitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. This book is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of antisemitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Jonathan Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges. Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia. Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism not only urges readers to question how they think about Judeophobia but also draws them into conversation with a range of leading thinkers whose insights are sorely needed in this perilous moment.”

Jonathan Judaken is the Gloria M. Goldstein Professor of Jewish History and Thought at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (2006) and a coeditor of Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context (2012) and The Albert Memmi Reader (2020), among other books. Professor Judaken’s research focuses on representations of Jews and Judaism, race and racism, existentialism, and post-Holocaust French Jewish thought.

This event is open to the general public and NYU Community (faculty, students and staff). All must have a valid ID and have preregistered.

Co-presented by the Remarque Institute at NYU.

Open to the Public with preregistration. Co-presented by NYU, Washington DC

Join us at NYU, Washington DC for a conversation with Professor Lila Corwin Berman (Temple University) and Daniel Greene (Northwestern University) about antisemitism in American Jewish history and the contemporary moment.

All are invited to join us for a reception from 6:00pm-6:30pm. The program will start at 6:30pm.

Lila Corwin Berman is the current Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History at Temple University and the incoming Paul & Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University, where she will direct the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History. Her most recent book, The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution, has been awarded the 2021 Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Saul Viener Book Prize from the American Jewish Historical Society. Her articles have appeared in several scholarly publications, as well as the Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy

Daniel Greene is Subject Matter Expert at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Adjunct Professor of History at Northwestern University. He curated Americans and the Holocaust, an exhibition that opened in 2018 at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, to commemorate its twenty-fifth anniversary. The exhibition also inspired The U.S. and the Holocaust, an Emmy-winning documentary film directed by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein that aired on PBS in 2022. Greene’s co-edited (with Edward Phillips) book, Americans and the Holocaust: A Reader, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2022. His book The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity (Indiana University Press, 2011) won the American Jewish Historical Society’s Saul Viener Book Prize in 2012.

This event is open to the NYU Community (faculty, students and staff) with a valid NYU ID. It is also open to HUC students. Please RSVP via the button below using your nyu.edu or HUC email address. A light, kosher lunch will be provided.

All guests must present a valid NYU ID at the check in desk when they arrive for the event.

Join editor Martin Dean and Professor Avinoam Patt for a discussion of the diary of Ita Dimant, Survival. Martin Dean will examine the unique qualities of Ita Dimant's reconstructed Holocaust diary and how it can help us to understand the tenuous and tortuous paths of Holocaust survivors. Ita Dimant was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, who escaped from there to Czestochowa, where she lived mostly on the Aryan side and acted as a courier for Underground Zionist organizations, passing on information about the situation in other ghettos. Fearing exposure, she contemplated suicide, but ultimately was deported to forced labor in Germany, where she survived until the liberation.  

Martin Dean holds a PhD in History from Cambridge University. He worked previously as a war crimes investigator and is now a historical consultant. He has edited and translated several books and is the author of four monographs, including Robbing the Jews (2008), which won a National Jewish Book Award.

Professor Avinoam Patt is the Director of NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism and the Maurice Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at New York University

When Jewish art dealer Berthe Weill opened her gallery in 1901, the infamous Dreyfus affair was calling attention to an alarming growth of antisemitism in France, dividing the nation and the Parisian art world alike into two opposing camps. This lecture, by Dr. Maurice Samuels, Professor of French at Yale University and the author of Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair (2024), explores Dreyfus’s complex relationship to Judaism and to antisemitism over the course of his life, and the profound effect of the Dreyfus Affair on the lives of Jews around the world.         

Before the lecture, visit Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde at the Grey Art Museum during special open hours on Monday, Oct. 21 from 5–6:15pm. Please check in at 20 Cooper Square to access the exhibit.

Free Admission. Guests must register via the button below in advance of the event. Ticketing will close the evening of October 20th. Please have a valid ID with you for check in at the event.

Co-presented by the Grey Art Museum, NYU.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Jewish Alumni Network.

MAURICE SAMUELS is the Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism at Yale University. He is the author of four books: The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France (Cornell, 2004); Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, 2010 / Hermann, 2017); The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (Chicago, 2016 / La Découverte, 2022); The Betrayal of the Duchess (Basic Books, 2020). Samuels is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and of the New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellowship. Alfred Dreyfus The Man at the Center of the Affair (Yale University Press, 2024) is his latest book.