Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism

The Fortunoff Video Archive and the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism are delighted to announce a lecture by renowned scholar Annette Wieviorka, a senior researcher emeritus at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Wieviorka is a scholar of twentieth-century Jewish history, in particular the Holocaust, and her varied works have been profoundly influential, notably her book The Era of Witness, which was published in translation in 1998 by Cornell University Press. Wieviorka has also been a volunteer organizer and interviewer for the Fortunoff Archive’s affiliated taping project in Paris and has served as an honorary advisory board member for decades.

In her lecture, Wieviorka will present a work in progress, acknowledging that she has been “thinking about this book for about forty years, a biblical generation.” During the pandemic, the project gathered steam as she began collecting extensive documentation about her family—including testimonies. As this family archive began to take shape, Wieviorka initially planned to write a biography of her grandfather, Wolf Wieviorka, a Yiddish writer and journalist murdered in Auschwitz. However, her work evolved from a singular textual “tomb” for one family member into a history of her entire family, the maternal as well as the paternal sides. In her lecture, Wieviorka will offer her incisive, assured point of view on what we can learn from this “autobiography of a family.”

Annette Wieviorka is a senior researcher emeritus at the CNRS. She is the author of many works on the history of the Holocaust and its memory, in addition to the history of communism. Her works include Déportation et génocide. Entre la mémoire et l’oubli (1992, 2003, 2013); L’ère du témoin (1998, 2013); Maurice et Jeannette. Biographie du couple Thorez (2010; 2016). Her intellectual journey was the subject of a book of interviews with Séverine Nikel: L’heure d’exactitude. Histoire, mémoire, témoignages (2011).

Location: HQ 136 and on Zoom:
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Since the American and French Revolutions, liberal democracy has always gone hand-in-hand with greater rights and opportunities for Jews. Conversely, times of crisis for liberal democracy—the Dreyfus Affair in France, Weimar Germany, our current moment—have been accompanied by rising antisemitism. This conference brings together leading scholars and thinkers to explore the relationship between Jews and liberalism historically as well as the role that antisemitism is playing in debates about liberalism today.

The conference made possible by a generous grant from the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund and the Betty MacMillan Center for International Studies at Yale, as well as the Jason M. Folk Memorial Fund.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration; the Program in Jewish Studies; the Department of French; and the Whitney Humanities Center.

Register here for in-person attendance

Register here for the livestream of the event

Conference Program

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Please join us for a conversation to celebrate the publication of Ruth Franklin’s new book, The Many Lives of Anne Frank.

Ruth Franklin’s latest book, The Many Lives of Anne Frank, will be published by Yale University Press in January 2025. Her previous book, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (2016), won numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography, and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2016, a Time magazine top nonfiction book of 2016, and a “best book of 2016” by The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, and others. She is also the author of A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (2011), which was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Writing. Her criticism and essays appear in many publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, and Harper’s. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in biography, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, a Leon Levy Fellowship in biography, and the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism.

Webinar registration link
 

The Islamic and Catholic political-religious empires have had a strikingly similar relationship with the modern state. Sunni and Catholic authorities experienced three major shocks and displacements—religious reformation, the rise of the nation-state, and mass migration — which shaped how each religion would come to experience the state’s political jurisdiction. Whereas early Christianity and Islam were characterized by missionary expansion, religious institutions forged in the modern era are primarily defensive in nature. They respond to the simple but overlooked imperative to adapt to political defeat while fighting off ideological challenges to their spiritual authority. This talk will discuss the historical path towards choosing transnational spiritual leadership over temporal political authority.

Jonathan Laurence is Professor of Political Science at Boston College and Director of the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy. A specialist in comparative politics, Professor Laurence’s scholarship focuses on politics and religion in Western Europe, Turkey, and North Africa. He is the co-author of Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France (2006) and the author of The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims: The State’s Role in Minority Integration (2012) and Coping with Defeat: Islam, Catholicism, and the Modern State (2021). Outside of the academy, Professor Laurence is a prolific and respected analyst. During his stint at the Brookings Institution (2008-2018), he addressed lawmakers on Capitol Hill, briefed diplomats, led a team of analysts at the State Department, and served on the Foreign Policy committee of two presidential campaigns. His research and commentary on international affairs have been featured on CNN and in the Washington Post, and he has published essays in the New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the Wall Street Journal.

Zoom Webinar
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As a Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi was a powerful voice for testimony and for reflections on the ethical consequences of the genocide. But he was also, especially in his first work, If This Is a Man, a careful analyst of the material conditions of camp life, including the workings of economy and labor. This talk examines Levi’s account of labor in Auschwitz-III, and in particular the uses and meanings of the language of slavery in that context.

Robert Gordon is Serena Professor of Italian at the University of Cambridge. He works on the literature, cinema, and cultural history of modern Italy. He is the author or editor of several volumes on the work of Primo Levi (e.g., Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues; Auschwitz Report; The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi; Innesti; Primo Levi magico) and a major study of the wider field of postwar cultural responses to the Holocaust (The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944–2010). He coedited the collection Holocaust Intersections and a special issue of the Jewish history journal Quest. He is also author of a recent work of comparative cultural criticism on the role and function of luck in modern storytelling, Modern Luck.

Cosponsored by the Department of Italian Studies

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