Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism

Please join us for a conversation to celebrate the publication of Maurice Samuels’s new book, Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair.

Maurice Samuels is the Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French at Yale University and the director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism. 
Alice Kaplan is Sterling Professor of French at Yale University.

Zoom registration link

In 2017 in Charlottesville, antisemitism and anti-Black racism converged as white supremacists, in a highly choreographed and violent protest against the removal of a statue honoring a Confederate general, carried Confederate flags and chanted “Jews will not replace us.” This convergence is not just a product of American history: its roots go far deeper. In this talk, Magda Teter, author of Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism, will explore the interplay between Christian theology and law to demonstrate how the theological framework of Christian supersessionism articulated in antiquity—and its subsequent application in law—led to the creation of social hierarchies and the legal exclusion of and denial of equality to Jews and Black people in modern times.

Magda Teter is Professor of History and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University. She is the author of Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (2005), Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation (2011), Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (2020), Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism (2023), and of dozens of articles in English, Hebrew, Italian, and Polish. Her book Blood Libel won the 2020 National Jewish Book Award, the George L. Mosse Prize from the American Historical Association, and the Roland H. Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society. Teter has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Cullman Center at the NYPL, the NEH, and others. Teter is currently President of the American Academy of Jewish Research.

Zoom registration link
Poster

Professor Michael Steinlauf will talk with Professor Marci Shore about his recently published book, This Was Not America: A Wrangle Through Jewish-Polish-American History. A dialogue with Polish historian Elżbieta Janicka, This Was Not America traces Steinlauf’s political and intellectual life from the Brighton Beach kitchens of Holocaust survivors in the 1950s to the Columbia University sit-ins of 1968, and later from the Solidarity movement in Poland of the 1980s to the wrenching debates about Polish complicity in the Holocaust that followed Solidarity’s victory and communism’s collapse. The book chronicles, too, the lives of his Polish Jewish parents, who survived the Holocaust, and the life of the author’s younger half-brother, who did not. Woven throughout the dialogue is a sometimes furious argument with Janicka about antisemitism, guilt, and the meaning of Polish-Jewish history.

Michael Steinlauf is the author of Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust as well as numerous studies of Jewish culture in prewar Poland. He was one of the founders of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Currently he is completing studies of the Polish Jewish dramatist Mark Arnshteyn and the Yiddish culture hero Y. L. Peretz.

Registration link
Poster

During the Holocaust, a handful of non-Jewish people risked their lives to save the targeted and condemned. While a few, such as Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, have received international attention for their valor, Yad Vashem, the memorial to the Holocaust in Israel, has recognized some 27,000 who risked their lives to save Jews with a special garden in Jerusalem. Richard Hurowitz’s IN THE GARDEN OF THE RIGHTEOUS: The Heroes Who Risked Their Lives to Save Jews During the Holocaust (Harper, 2023) pays tribute to these men and women who risked their life, liberty, or career to help their neighbors, and often complete strangers, to survive.

Richard Hurowitz is a writer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and publisher of the Octavian Report. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, the Los Angeles Times, Time, History Today and the Jerusalem Post. He is a graduate of Yale University, where he studied history, and Columbia Law School. He lives in New York City with his family.

Registration Link
Poster

Where is the best place for victims of extreme violence to testify? In a courtroom or in the more private setting of a filmed interview? After working on the films of the historical Nuremberg trials, I have gone on to film survivors of the Shoah, as well as those who have curated the great collections of survivor testimonies, particularly at Yale, along with about twenty survivors and witnesses (doctors, firefighters, neighbors) of the November 13, 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. In this presentation, I will also show an excerpt from my latest film, 13 November: Their Lives Were Never Ordinary.

Christian Delage is a historian and filmmaker. From 2014–2021, he directed the Institute for the History of the Present in Paris. He has frequently been a visiting professor at Cardozo Law School. He has recently completed a new film, 13 November: Their Lives Were Never Ordinary (Zadig Productions, 2022, 70 minutes) and will soon publish Filming, Judging: From Nuremberg to the Attacks of November 13, 2015 (Gallimard, 2023).

Sponsored by Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, Department of French, and Whitney Humanities Center
Poster