Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism

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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Poster

5 pm, Zoom EST

The Benjamin (Yale 1962) and Barbara Zucker Lecture Series
Adam Stern (University of Wisconsin-Madison) in discussion with Paul North

A Theological-Political Genealogy attends to survival as a notion of critical historical urgency. Beginning with the identification of “Jewish survival” as a prominent rhetorical transit-point for this discourse, it redirects the genealogy toward the theological-political history of Latin Christianity. Survival, the book argues, translates the image of Christ’s sovereign body for the modern, secular political imagination.

Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism and Whitney Humanities Center
Registration link
Poster

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
Registration link
Poster