Reckoning with October 7: Israel, Hamas, and the Problem of Critical Theory
A TPPI Conference
November 8–9, 2024
New York City
 The Telos-Paul Piccone Institute welcomes paper proposals for a conference that reckons with the response, both within higher education at large and especially from the precincts of critical theory, to the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023. The conference will cap a year of webinars, podcasts, blog posts, and publications about the topic, and will form the basis of a special memorial issue of the journal Telos. Full papers intended for that special issue will also be considered at this time.
Beginning in the immediate, politicized aftermath of the Hamas atrocities, theory has been present—in ways that should give us pause. It was present in sublimated ways, as widespread presuppositions and “narratives” infused with charismatic authority by a popularized postcolonial jargon. It was there in kinetic, emotionally charged, intellectually unsophisticated responses, in “mass” demonstrations, public statements by groups and institutions, and individual social media campaigns. It was there in “intersectional” ideology. Yet above all, it was manifest in considered, open, intentional ways within universities, as well as among educated elites taught and credentialed by them. The college campus, the traditional home of critical theory—which emerged in the twentieth century most powerfully as a response to fascism and Nazism—has become a nodal point for the dramatic unfolding of a cognitively, morally, and politically deficient discourse about a present-day Kristallnacht.
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The fourth webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s yearlong series reckoning with the response to October 7 will take place on Sunday, April 7, 2024, at noon Eastern Time.
Click here to register for the event.
All subsequent panels are likewise scheduled for noon Eastern Time on the seventh day of each month. Panels will run between 90 to 120 minutes, followed by a colloquy among the panelists and audience Q&A.
Our fourth webinar is titled “How to Teach in a (Culture) War: October 7, Antisemitism, and the Academy.” Our panelists are David Tse-Chien Pan, who will speak on “Diversity in Higher Education,” and Olga Kirschbaum-Shirazki, who will speak on “History and Theory, the Necessity of the Dialectic: The Case of Modern Jewish History.” Our respondent is John M. Ellis.
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By Michael Saenger · Friday, February 2, 2024 For me, the first indication I had that something was wrong on October 7 was scrolling through my Facebook feed. A childhood friend posted “My heart is in the East.” I knew something terrible had happened. Was happening.
And then, it turned out that we were not so safe over here. Within days—within hours, actually—the antisemitic impulses that had been hiding in American culture started to come out in the open. That wave hit the Modern Language Association, where it was framed as progressive.
First, the boundaries of the debate about Israel moved. Before October, there was pressure to scorn Israel through boycotts, and to portray Israel as a colonial or apartheid state.
What was a debate turned into a denunciation. October 7, for some, rapidly became background noise to what they see as a need for an immediate ceasefire. Israel’s actions could easily be understood as self-defense, but there are some who contend that those actions can only be understood as an act of vengeance.
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By Gabriel Noah Brahm · Wednesday, January 31, 2024 For the accompanying essay by Casey Spinks, click here.
On January 7, 2024, we began a series of webinars, “Reckoning with October 7: Israel, Hamas, and the Problem of Critical Theory,” with the first installment of that projected 12-part, yearlong endeavor. Our question, to start, was how might critical theory have contributed to softening the ground, or paving the way, for the perverse reception of 10/7 on the American college campus in particular, which actually celebrated [sic!] the Hamas torture, murder, rape, and kidnapping spree as a “liberation” movement on behalf the wretched of earth? And how, if at all, might theory redeem itself from such charges of complicity with evil?
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By Casey Spinks · Wednesday, January 31, 2024 For Gabriel Noah Brahm’s preface to this essay, click here.
In the first panel of TPPI’s Israel Initiative webinar series devoted to discussing the atrocities of October 7, one of the chief points of debate was whether critical theory—or any other theory—was up to the task of reckoning with Hamas’s massacre of Jews and its ensuing embrace from certain parts of academia.
Abe Silberstein cautioned that it is not helpful to emphasize the disruptive character of these attacks or the notion that something new has happened. Instead, violence like this is, unfortunately, what human beings have been doing to each other for a long time. And Silberstein, thus, seems committed to the tough work of theorizing about these events and distinguishing carefully where their academic boosters have erred in their theorizing about them.
Cary Nelson, Gabriel Noah Brahm, and Manuela Consonni, however, held that there is not much theory going on. Nelson even admitted that “no theory that I’ve been working with for the past sixty years” is up to the job of understanding or explaining this event. Consonni also cautioned that it’s not a matter of “whether or not Franz Fanon is being followed.” They agree that there is something more sinister at work than bad theory.
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By Gabriel Noah Brahm · Friday, January 19, 2024 Collin May’s essay “Critical Theory as an Anti-Emancipatory Project” appeared earlier this week in TelosScope.
Collin May would not seem like an ideal target for cancelation—if by that one means someone relatively defenseless, inarticulate or unable to speak for himself, lacking in intellectual resources to understand his predicament, uncredentialed, without elite professional training in the subject he is accused of mishandling, or ready access to legal counsel. Or if by that one means someone accused of having done something wrong under murky circumstances, in any way nebulous, difficult to check, or hard to prove one way or the other.
To the contrary. May is himself a lawyer, trained philosopher, theologian, and scholar of Islam. Yet he ran afoul of the powers of “woke” that be, over the publication of an academic book review on the subject of Islamic history, published years ago in a prestigious outlet, just when he had stepped into a prominent role as a Canadian civil servant.
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