Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism

Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, is one of the oldest Jewish neighborhoods in the country, known for its tight-knit community and the profusion of multigenerational families. On October 27, 2018, a gunman killed eleven Jews who were worshipping at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill—the most deadly anti-Semitic attack in American history. In this talk, Mark Oppenheimer shifts the focus away from the criminal and his crime and instead presents the historic, spirited community at the center of this heartbreak. He discusses his findings—based on 250 interviews with residents and nonresidents, Jews and gentiles, survivors and witnesses, teenagers and seniors—about how neighborhood, and religious institutions, promote resilience.

Mark Oppenheimer holds a BA in history and a PhD in religious studies from Yale, where he teaches in the English department and directs the Yale Journalism Initiative. He is the author of five books, including Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture and The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia. He was the religion columnist for the New York Times from 2010 to 2016 and has written for the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Mother Jones, The Nation, and The Believer, among other publications. The host of Tablet magazine’s podcast Unorthodox, Oppenheimer has also taught at Stanford, Wellesley, NYU, and Boston College. His newest book is Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood, published last October by Knopf and supported by a grant from Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism.

Sponsored by Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism
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The Benjamin (Yale 1962) and Barbara Zucker Lecture Series
James McAuley, Global Opinions columnist, The Washington Post

In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jews—pillars of an embattled community—invested their fortunes in France’s cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country’s army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps. This talk explores the central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siècle.

James McAuley is a European Affairs columnist for the Washington Post and recently received his PhD from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar. The House of Fragile Things is his first book.

Sponsored by Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism and Whitney Humanities Center
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5 pm, Zoom EST

The Benjamin (Yale 1962) and Barbara Zucker Lecture Series
Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker

Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007), Listen to This (2010), and Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (2020). In 2008 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Sponsored by Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Whitney Humanities Center
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The Benjamin (Yale 1962) and Barbara Zucker Lecture Series
Philip G. Nord (Princeton University) will engage in conversation with Carolyn Dean and Maurice Samuels about his new book, After the Deportation: Memory Battles in Postwar France.

An estimated 160,000 people, a mix of résistants and Jews, were deported from France to concentration camps in Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War.  In the decades following the Liberation, the French argued over how to remember the deportees, generating competing narratives about the Deportation experience—Communist, Gaullist, Jewish, and Catholic. This talk will analyze these narratives and how they were given form in literature, art, film, and monuments.

Sponsored by the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism and Whitney Humanities Center
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The Benjamin (Yale 1962) and Barbara Zucker Lecture Series
Terrence L. Johnson, Georgetown University
(Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism and Whitney Humanities Center)
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