The video of the seventh webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel Initiative is now available and can be viewed here. Titled “Online Antisemitism after October 7,” the panel featured Matthias J. Becker, who discussed “Antisemitism after October 7: Insights from Social Media Studies,” and Günther Jikeli, who addressed “Antisemitic Mobilization across Ideological Borders through Social Media.” Their conversation was moderated by Israel Initiative director Gabriel Noah Brahm.
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The video of the sixth webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel Initiative is now available and can be viewed here. Titled “Free Speech and Campus Antisemitism: Academic Freedom, to What End?,” the panel featured Michael S. Kochin, Geoff Shullenberger, and Jacob Siegel, and their conversation was moderated by Israel Initiative director Gabriel Noah Brahm. The next webinar in the Israel webinar series will take place on July 7. I am a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Oregon, and I am an observant, progressive Jew. I appreciate the efforts of conservatives, some of whom have made valuable contributions to the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative, to expose antisemitism in my profession and among my students since October 7. I share their concern that anti-Zionism has become one plank in an anti-liberal, anti-capitalist, anti-American project characteristic of some segments of the contemporary left. It’s vital to bear in mind that Jews have thrived when liberal, American values and institutions have been strong. Does this mean, as Bari Weiss counsels, that I should join Jews in a lockstep turn to the right? I think not. Twenty-five years ago, in Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty challenged what he called the “cultural left” to suspend high theory, identity politics, and cultural revolution to attend instead to the economic distress of the many Americans left behind by neoliberalism. He challenged an increasingly anti-American left to build a left-wing patriotism. And he pointed to domestic historical resources to realize those aims in the work of Emerson, Whitman, and Dewey. Rorty feared the alternative to such pragmatic liberalism was an authoritarian demagogue, who would reverse the gains of identity politics and usher in an era of American fascism.
Küntzel’s books Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold and Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 are available in the Telos Press store. The following essay is part of a special series of responses to recent events centered, for now, at Columbia University, and extending beyond its confines to include the wider array of societal problems that the disorder there symptomatizes. For details, see Gabriel Noah Brahm, “From Palestine Avenue to Morningside Heights.”
—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative
While Snow’s thesis has not entirely aged well (many universities today, for example, mandate that students take courses in both the sciences and the humanities) and while one can find isolated examples of people combining both (e.g., Oliver Sacks), the response by faculty to the recent wave of protests shows that a deep gulf still separates the humanities and the sciences. The 2025 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Annual Conference China Keywords / 中国关键词A one-page version of this call for papers, in PDF form, is available here. We encourage you to print and post this page in your home institution. About the ConferenceThe 2025 annual conference of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute will culminate the first year of a five-year program—the Telos China Initiative—that has aimed to set Telos on a distinct intellectual course.
We believe that the future of the TPPI now lies in a parallel reciprocal engagement with China, to which we have given steadily increasing focus for the past ten years in our annual conferences. These meetings have laid the basis for seven special issues of the journal Telos, as well as numerous individual articles in the field. With the Telos China Initiative, we seek to become a key bridge for a mutually regarding, critical discussion of social and political theory between China and the West, well beyond the circles of East Asia specialists. |
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The Telos circle falls outside many conventional intellectual categories. During the Cold War, this quality enabled us to form a bridge between Eastern Europe and the Anglosphere. We fostered work by Soviet-bloc intellectuals, helping Western readers understand the ideological dynamics at play behind the Iron Curtain; we supported a wide variety of dissidents in their opposition to bureaucratic centralization, as we have likewise for opponents of bureaucratic governance in the West; and we brokered an encounter between Marxism and phenomenology that was vital for critical thinkers in the Soviet and the liberal democratic world. 
