Professor William Kolbrener, Department of English Literature, Bar Ilan University, leads this three-week course exploring the nature of antisemitism in the progressive academy today. Parents, students, and academics from all disciplines are welcome!
An overview of the sessions can be found below:
Week One: Critical Theory Against Israel and the Jews – how the contemporary Humanities takes the insights of post-Holocaust Jewish social critics – the Frankfurt School – and with the help of critics like Edward Said and Michel Foucault, turned them against the Jews and Israel.
Dr. Daniel Feldman, Department of English Literature, Bar Ilan University, will also be joining this session to offer his insights into critical theory against Israel and the Jews.
Week Two: George Steiner and the (Good) Stateless Jew – how the great Jewish literary critic, George Steiner, prefers Jews in a new ghetto of their intellectual exile, providing a 1980s manifesto for progressive antisemitism.
Week Three: Antisemitism and Intersectionality – Towards a New Pedagogy – moving beyond the idea of intersectionality, and ideas of diversity based on the exclusion of Jews and Israel, we consider a way of breaking the identity-politics stranglehold on the Humanities, and explore a possible pedagogy for the future of democracy.
Recordings are available for purchase.
William Kolbrener is a Professor of English Literature at Bar Ilan University. William earned his MA from Oxford University and his PhD from Columbia University. He is the author of books on the eighteenth-century British proto-feminist Mary Astell, as well as John Milton, the author of Paradise Lost. He has also written The Last Rabbi on Joseph Soloveitchik, and a collection of personal essays, Open Minded Torah. Kolbrener has also written on Israel, Judaism, and antisemitism in a variety of venues including Tablet, The Washington Post, Commentary, Times Higher Education, Ha’aretz, The Forward, and The Jerusalem Post. He is currently working on a new book, Melancholy Aesthetics – from Milton to Addison.
Limited student scholarships available upon request: [email protected]