Description:

Professor Balthaser’s talk will explore the century-long history of opposition to Zionism on the Jewish American left, recently witnessing major protests on campuses, the streets, and in the halls of Congress, organized by Jewish groups and in the name of Jewish ethical and communal values. As the title implies, often such opposition to Israel’s current war and to the nation’s longer history of displacement and apartheid is offered not to eschew the Holocaust’s long shadow, but in active memory-making of its legacy and the legacy of a Jewish fight against fascism and racism. 

This talk is co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the American Cultures Colloquium, the Council for Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), the Department of English, the Department of Religious Studies, and the Middle East and North African Studies Program (MENA). 

Benjamin Balthaser is Associate Professor of Multi-Ethnic U.S. Literature at Indiana University, South Bend. His books include Dedication, a creative memoir of growing up in a “red diaper” Jewish family, Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War, on transnational circuits of modernism’s “third wave,” and Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the Jewish Left, due from Verso this summer.