The first webinar in our yearlong series reckoning with the response to October 7 is available here. Panelists included Cary Nelson, Abe Silberstein, and Manuela Consonni. Their conversation was moderated by Israel initiative director Gabriel Noah Brahm. Eighty audience members heard their illuminating conversation, which provided a model of respectful engagement amidst disagreement, and many stayed for another hour for a casual, after-panel discussion.
The next webinar in the Israel webinar series will take place on Wednesday, February 7, at noon ET.
Presenters
Cary Nelson was President of the American Association of University Professors from 2006 to 2012, and he is emeritus professor of English and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A scholar of modern American poetry and critical theory, he is the author of Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (2001), Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (1997), and No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom (2010), among many other works. His edited and co-edited books include Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988) and Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (1994). His contributions to American academic life are the subject of Michael Rothberg and Peter Garrett, eds., Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University: Poetry, Politics, and the Profession (2009).
Abe Silberstein is a writer and critic based in New York. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Ha’aretz, The Forward, Tel Aviv Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement (UK), Dissent, London Review of Books, War on the Rocks, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Israel Policy Exchange. He manages English-language communications for a non-governmental organization committed to building a shared society of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Respondent
Manuela Connsoni is Pela and Adam Starkopf Chair in Holocaust Studies and Director of the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Three Faces of Antifascism: Narratives of Resistance in Italian Political Culture (2023), Primo Levi as Job in Search of his Roots. On Evil, Suffering and Survival after the Camps (in press), and Resistenza or Holocaust? The Memory of the Deportation and Extermination in Italy, 1945–1985 (2010). Her co-edited books include Witnessing the Witness of War Crimes, Mass Murder, and Genocide: From the 1920s to the Present (2023) and Sartre, the Jew and the Other: Rethinking Antisemitism, Race and Gender (2020). She is editor in chief of the Vidal Sassoon Studies in Antisemitism, Racism and Prejudice book series and of the journal Analysis of Current Trends in Antisemitism-ACTA. She is currently at work on two books that grow from a study of Julius Evola.
Moderator and Host
Gabiel Noah Brahm is Professor of English and World Literature at Northern Michigan University, and currently serves as the Hochberg Family Library Scholar-in-Residence at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) in Miami Beach, Florida. He has been appointed as a visiting scholar at the University of Haifa’s Herzl Institute for the Study of Zionism, the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University, the Program in Philosophy and Religions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Yad Vashem (World Holocaust Remembrance Center). He is co-editor (with Cary Nelson) of The Case against Academic Boycotts of Israel, and a frequent contributor to leading journals of social theory and political commentary, such as Telos, Fathom, The American Mind, Society, and Perspectives on Political Science.
