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Please join the Global Religion and Politics Research Group as they host Julie Cooper (Tel Aviv University)

Since October 7, we have witnessed an unprecedented crisis of confidence in the liberal state and the nation-state — the political frameworks which promised a new era of Jewish vitality after the nadir of the Holocaust. At a moment when post-WWII commonplaces about the regimes which are “good for the Jews” have begun to crumble, diasporic traditions of political thought assume new resonance. In this talk, I showcase a forgotten mode of Jewish political thought, which I call the diasporic analysis of state forms. In the first half of the twentieth century, the analysis and critique of state forms was an urgent project for Jewish thinkers from across the ideological spectrum. Precisely because diasporic political formations are threatened by Western doctrines of sovereignty, Jewish thinkers were impelled to study the various forms that states have historically taken. My talk will focus on Hannah Arendt and Salo Baron — scholars who anatomized the different regimes under which Jews have lived, attaching near-existential significance to variations in state structures. Inspired by these traditions, I encourage contemporary scholars of Jewish politics to develop a critical taxonomy of state forms – at a crisis moment when neither the nation-state nor the liberal state can be said to have offered a definitive solution to the Jewish question. 

Julie E. Cooper is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University, where she also directs the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism.