Zionism and Anti-Zionism Since October 7: The Thunderstorm in the Cloud

Robert Seltzer Lecture Series

Zionism and Anti-Zionism Since October 7: The Thunderstorm in the Cloud

The Hamas massacres of October 7, 2023 and the subsequent war in Gaza were world-altering events. They should have spurred new and creative ways of thinking on the Right and the Left. Instead, the opposite has occurred. Stark Manichean divisions; nostalgic reveries; unworkable “solutions”; morally obtuse (and sometimes morally obscene) analogies; and false historic accounts have become alarmingly common, especially among a coterie of left-wing public intellectuals. Perhaps even worse, those writers who do approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the nuance and complexity it requires find themselves accused of moral evasion and cowardice. In a time of crisis, and in the absence of clear thinking, how can rational and productive political judgments be made?

Presented by: Susie Linfield, a professor of journalism at NYU, is the author of The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence and The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky. She writes for a variety of publications, including the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, Dissent, the Atlantic, Sapir, and Quillette.

This lecture will be held online via Zoom. 

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