In this groundbreaking book, leading Arab and Jewish intellectuals examine how and why the Holocaust and the Nakba are interlinked without blurring fundamental differences between them. While these two foundational tragedies are often discussed separately and in abstraction from the constitutive historical global contexts of nationalism and colonialism, The Holocaust and the Nakba explores the historical, political, and cultural intersections between them. The majority of the contributors argue that these intersections are embedded in cultural imaginations, colonial and asymmetrical power relations, realities, and structures. Focusing on them paves the way for a new political, historical, and moral grammar that enables a joint Arab-Jewish dwelling and supports historical reconciliation in Israel/Palestine.
With:
Gil Anidjar, Columbia University
Alon Confino, UMass Amherst
Amos Goldberg, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Raef Zreik, Tel Aviv University
Gil Hochberg, Columbia University (Panel Chair)
This event is cosponsored by the Department of Religion, the Middle East Institute, and the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.
Gil Anidjar is Professor in the Departments of Religion, the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS). His books include ‘Our Place in al-Andalus’: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters (Stanford UP, 2002); The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford UP, 2003); Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford UP, 2008); and Blood: a Critique of Christianity (Columbia UP, 2014).
Alon Confino is professor of history and director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. He is an expert on modern German and European history, Holocaust and genocide, Zionism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Educated at Tel Aviv University and at UC Berkeley, he has published extensively on these topics, as well as contributing to the general media, including NPR. His recent books explored the Holocaust and genocide: Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust As Historical Understanding (2012) and A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (2014), which won a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and was nominated by Yale University Press for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He is currently working on a book on 1948 in Palestine that crafts two narratives: one is based on the experience of Palestinians, Jews, and British based on letters, diaries, and oral history, and the second is placing 1948 within global perspective of decolonization, forced migrations, and partitions.
Amos Goldberg is an associate professor in the department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the years 2016-2018 he was the department’s chair. His research focuses on various aspects of the cultural history of the Jews in the Holocaust and on Holocaust memory and politics in contemporary world. Together with Alon Confino and Raz Segal he recently published an article in the Hebrew outlet Sicha Mekomiton the current controversy on the Warsaw Ghetto Museum in Warsaw. Among his recent publications is Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust (Indiana UP 2017) and his co-edited book with Bashir Bashir The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia University Press, 2018).
Raef Zreik earned his LLB and LLM degree magna cum laude from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He practiced law for about ten years, then he earned another LLM from Columbia Law School. In 2001 started his SJD studies at HLS and earned his degree at 2007. He is the academic co-director of the Minerva Center for the humanities at Tel Aviv University, and an associate professor at Ono Academic College, where he teaches jurisprudence, property law, law and culture. He is a senior researcher at Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. Fields of interest include legal and political theory, citizenship and identity, and legal interpretation. Recent publications include “Subject, Subjectivity and Subjugation,” Comparative Literature and Culture (Forthcoming 2019), “Kant, Time and Revolution,” Graduate Faculty Journal of Philosophy, 39(1) 197-225 (2018); “When Does the Settler Become Native,” in Constellation, 2016; “Israel/Palestine Now and South Africa Then – on the Analogy and Its limits” in Law Society and Culture-Tel Aviv University Series, 2017 (with Azar Dakwar). Raef is on the editorial board of Theory and Criticism (Hebrew), Maftiah –Lexical Review of Political Thought (Hebrew and English), Journal of Palestine Studies (Arabic), and Journal of Levantine Studies (English).
Gil Hochberg (Chair) is Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the intersections among psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, nationalism, gender and sexuality. She has published essays on a wide range of issues including: Francophone North African literature, Palestinian literature, the modern Levant, gender and nationalism, cultural memory and immigration, memory and gender, Hebrew Literature, Israeli and Palestinian Cinema, Mediterraneanism, Trauma and Narrative. Her first book, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton University Press, 2007), examines the complex relationship between the signifiers “Arab” and “Jew” in contemporary Jewish and Arab literatures. Her most recent book, Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Duke University Press, 2015), is a study of the visual politics of the Israeli-Palestinian. She is currently writing a book on art, archives and the production of historical knowledge.