On Thursday, January 25, UC Berkeley’s Ethan Katz visited Barnard College for the first installment of the “Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Palestine and Israel” speaker series, sponsored by Barnard College, the Barnard Program in Jewish Studies, and the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. Katz’s talk, “The Debate Over Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism: The Terms and the Stakes,” was followed by an animated audience Q&A session.
Dr. Katz’s talk, and the Q&A session, are available to view in full below.
Ethan Katz is currently Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the award-winning The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard, 2015) and the co-editor of several other volumes, including Colonialism and the Jews, and most recently When Jews Argue: Between the University and the Beit Midrash, which just appeared from Routledge last fall.
Pertinent to our series, Professor Katz has played a leading and thoughtful role in promoting complex and often difficult dialogues about antisemitism on college campuses. As the Chair of the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Jewish Student Life and Campus Climate, as a co-founder of the Antisemitism Education Initiative at Berkeley, and as the chair of a taskforce of the Association for Jewish Studies on antisemitism and academic freedom, he has worked toward creating guidelines of education and engagement for students, campus leaders, and teachers across the United States. Through his scholarship and his public-facing work, he has developed considerable knowledge of the subject, as well as wide-ranging experience in dialoguing across differences.
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