The video of the second webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative is now available and can be viewed here. Titled “Historians on Ideology and Politics in the 1948 War: October 7 and the Aftershocks of World War II,” the webinar featured historians Jeffrey Herf, Matthias Küntzel, and Benny Morris. Their conversation was moderated by Israel initiative director Gabriel Noah Brahm.
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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. For the accompanying essay by Casey Spinks, click here.
For Gabriel Noah Brahm’s preface to this essay, click here.
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. Collin May’s essay “Critical Theory as an Anti-Emancipatory Project” appeared earlier this week in TelosScope.
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.
The next webinar in the Israel webinar series will take place on Wednesday, February 7, at noon ET. |
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