Center for the Humanities Symposiums

The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism
in the West

April 5-7 , 2006

Wednesday, April 5

4:15 p.m. South Lounge, Tony Kushner: "Anti-Semitism in Britain: Continuity and the Absence of a Resurgence"
Stream: High | Low | Audio

8:00 p.m. South Lounge, Karen Mock: "Antisemitism and Anti-Racism in the US and Canada Today:  The Challenge of Putting Theory into Practice"
Stream: High | Low | Audio

Thursday, April 6

11:00 a.m. Sebring-Lewis, Sander L. Gilman: "The Reappearance of Race in American Science: Are Jews Immune to Alcoholism?"
Stream: High | Low | Audio

4:15 p.m. South Lounge, Michel Wieviorka: "The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism in the West : The French Case"
Stream: High | Low | Audio

Streaming files require Quicktime Player 7 or above.

Sander L. Gilman

Sander Gilman recently joined the faculty at Emory University as Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Sciences. Gilman was the Henry R. Luce Distinguished Service Professor of the Liberal Arts in Human Biology at the University of Illinois at Chicago , where he also had appointments in the Departments of Germanic Studies, Comparative Literature, and Psychiatry. Before Chicago , Professor Gilman was a member of the humanities and medical faculties at Cornell University for 25 years. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over seventy books, and is one of the best known and highly respected humanities scholars in the United States . He is the author of the basic study of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane, published by John Wiley and Sons in 1982 (reprinted: 1996) as well as the standard study of Jewish Self-Hatred, the title of his Johns Hopkins University Press monograph of 1986. More recently, his first biography Jurek Becker: ALife in Five Worlds appeared in 2003, his monograph Fat Boys: A Slim Book appeared in 2004, and his critical study of Franz Kafka appeared in 2005.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner holds the Marcus Sieff Chair in the Department of History and is Director of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/ non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton . His main research area is British Jewish history in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries covering the social history of British Jewry, immigration issues and responses to the Jews, and is perhaps the best-known scholar working on anti-Semitism in Britain today. Author or editor of over a dozen works, his most recent books are Remembering Refugees: Then and Now (2006) and We Europeans? Mass-Observation, ‘Race’ and British Identity in the Twentieth Century (2004).

Karen Mock

Karen Mock is an Educational Psychologist and Human Rights/Anti-Racist Activist and currently Chair of the Hate Crimes Community Working Group (for the Attorney General of Ontario). She served from 2001 to 2005 as Executive Director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, before which she spent 12 years as National Director of the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith Canada . She has published widely in the areas of multiculturalism, anti-racism, antisemitism, and human rights, including educational resources and workplace diversity training programs and manuals, was responsible for the first course in multicultural teacher education in Canada , and is widely acknowledged as one of the foremost Canadian authorities on anti-racist education. In 2001, she chaired the Canadian Advisory Committee for the World Conference Against Racism and attended as a delegate in Durban , South Africa .

Michel Wieviorka

Michel Wieviorka is one of France ’s leading sociologists. He teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and is the Director of CADIS (Centre d’Analyse et d’Intervention Sociologique) and of the monthly magazine “Le Monde des Débats.” In addition to his recent monumental study La Tentation antisémite: Haine des juifs dans la France d’aujourd’hui (2005; The Anti-Semitic Temptation: The Hatred of Jews in Today’s France), Wieviorka is the co-author or editor of over 20 books on subjects ranging from racism and multiculturalism to social movements and terrorism, and over the past decade, he has been a leading figure engaged in responding to the re-emergence of racism in France.