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[Racism and Antisemitism]

Racism and Antisemitism

Hannah Arendt Center Annual Fall Conference 2019

Thursday, October 10, 2019 – Friday, October 11, 2019
Olin Humanities Building
10:00 am – 6:00 pm

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Speakers

Kenyon Victor Adams

[Kenyon Victor Adams]
Kenyon Victor Adams is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. His recent work explores the notion of fractured epistemologies, and seeks to reclaim or expand various ways of knowing through integrative artistic practices. Kenyon has contributed art and thought leadership at Yale School of Drama, Yale ISM Poetry Conference, Live IdeasFestival, the Langston Hughes Project, the National Arts Policy Roundtable, and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. He studied Religion & Literature at Yale Divinity School, and Theology of Contemporary Performance at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Kenyon served as Artist in Residence at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music for the 2015-16 academic year. His multi-media performance works have addressed issues of legibility, race, and American memory. Currently in production through New York Live Arts, Prayers of the People,Directed by Bill T. Jones, is a performance work responding to the writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. Kenyon is the Founding Arts Initiative Director at Grace Farms and the SANAA-designed River Building in New Canaan, CT. 
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Adams made his feature film debut as Jason in award-winning director Lee Isaac Chung’s 2010 narrative feature Lucky Life, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival and was selected for the Moscow International Film Festival, Torino Film Festival, American Film Festival Poland, and others. Kenyon has performed nationally as a vocalist, songwriter, and blues harmonica player.  In 2011, he formed the band Kenyon Adams & American Restless. With director Sarah Peterson and jazz scholar, Willie Ruff, Kenyon helped to stage Long Wharf Theater’s production of Langston’s Hughes’ Black Nativity. Adams has received awards including the Yale Institute of Sacred Music’s Director’s Prize, and was named a White House Presidential Scholar in the Arts. 

Nana Adusei-Poku

[Nana Adusei-Poku]
Nana Adusei-Poku ( PhD) is Senior Academic Advisor and Luma Foundation Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. She held the position Research Professor for Cultural Diversity from 2013 to 2014, for Visual Cultures at the Willem de Kooning Academy (2015–17), and was Guest Lecturer at the University of the Arts, Zurich from 2012-2018. She received her PhD from Humboldt University Berlin for her thesis on post-black art, called “Gender as a Category of Knowledge,” following degrees in African studies and gender studies at Humboldt University, and in media and communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has been a visiting Professor at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, in New York; and visiting scholar at the University of Ghana, Legon; the London School of Economics; and Columbia University, New York. Her articles have been published in Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, eflux, Kunstforum International, Flash Art, L’Internationale, and Darkmatter a.o., and translated in English, German, Portuguese, French, and Swedish. She curated the event Performances of No-thingness at the Academy of Arts Berlin in 2018 and the program: Longing on a Large Scale in conjunction with Todd Gray's Exhibition Eucledian Gris Gris at Pomona College Museum of Art 2019-2020. 

Peter Baehr

[Peter Baehr]
Born in Malaysia and educated in Britain, Peter Baehr is Research Professor in Social Theory at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His books include Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World (1997), Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences (2010), and The Unmasking Style in Social Theory (2019). He is currently preparing The Book of Dictators for Penguin Classics.   

Etienne Balibar

[Etienne Balibar]
Etienne Balibar was born in 1942. He graduated at the Sorbonne in Paris, later took his PhD from the University of Nijmegen (Netherlands). He is now Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris-Nanterre, and Anniversary Chair of Contemporary European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. He is author or co-author of Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser) (1965); Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities (Verso, 1991, with Immanuel Wallerstein); Masses, Classes, Ideas (Routledge, 1994); The Philosophy of Marx (Verso 1995), Spinoza and Politics (Verso 1998), Politics and the Other Scene (Verso, 2002); We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton, 2004); Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness (Verso, 2013); Violence and Civility (Columbia University Press, 2015); Citizen Subject. Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology (Fordham University Press, 2017); Secularism and Cosmopolitanism (Columbia University Press, 2018).  

Kathryn Sophia Belle

[Kathryn Sophia Belle]
Professor Belle's primary research and teaching interests lie in Continental philosophy (especially Existentialism and Phenomenology), African American/Africana Philosophy, Black Feminist Philosophy, and Critical Philosophy of Race.  She has also taught in African American Studies/African Diaspora Studies.  Some of the major figures she writes about and teaches include Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon,  Anna Julia Cooper and Richard Wright.  Under the name Kathryn T. Gines, she has published articles on race, assimilation, feminism, intersectionality, and sex and sexuality in contemporary hip-hop.  She  co-edited an anthology titled Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2010) and is author of Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Indiana University Press, 2014).  Professor Belle is the founding director of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers (CBWP), the former director (2010-2016) of Cultivating Underrepresented Students in Philosophy (CUSP), and a founding co-editor (2013-2016) of the journal Critical Philosophy of Race (CPR). 

Leon Botstein

[Leon Botstein]
President, Bard College. Chairman, Central European University. Board member Open Society Foundations. Music Director, American Symphony Orchestra 1992 to present. Artistic director, Summerscape and Bard Music Festivals. Music Director, Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra (2003 to 2010).

Roger Berkowitz

[Photo Credit: Doug Menuez]
Photo Credit: Doug Menuez
Roger Berkowitz has been teaching political theory, legal thought, and human rights at Bard College since 2005. He is the academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College.
Professor Berkowitz is an interdisciplinary scholar, teacher, and writer. His interests stretch from Greek and German philosophy to legal history and from the history of science to images of justice in film and literature. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition; coeditor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics; editor of Revenge and Justice, a special issue of Law, Culture, and the Humanities; and a contributing editor to Rechtsgeschichte. His essays have appeared in numerous academic journals. Roger Berkowitz received his B.A. from Amherst College; J.D. from Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley; and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. 

Aliza Becker

[Aliza Becker]
Aliza Becker is an Associate Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. In that capacity, she has founded and directed two oral history projects. The American Jewish Peace Archive documents 50 years of activism by Jews in the U.S. for Israeli-Palestinian peace and reconciliation. Becker recently launched in collaboration with Noah Schoen "The Meanings of October 27th: Reflections by Pittsburghers on the Impact of the 2018 Synagogue Shooting."

Robert Boyers

[Robert Boyers]
Robert Boyers is the author of eleven books, the most recent of which are The Fate of Ideas (Columbia University Press, 2015) and The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, Intolerance and the Hunt for Political Heresies (Scribners, September 2019). He is the Editor of the quarterly SALMAGUNDI, Director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute and Professor of English at Skidmore College. He writes frequently for such periodicals as Harpers, The New Republic, The Nation, The American Scholar, Chronicle of Higher Education and Granta.

Joy Connolly

[Joy Connolly]
Joy Connolly began her service as President of the American Council of Learned Societies on July 1, 2019. Previously, she served as provost and interim president of The Graduate Center at the City University of New York, where she was also Distinguished Professor of Classics. She has held faculty appointments at New York University, where she served as Dean for the Humanities from 2012-16, Stanford University, and the University of Washington. Committed to broadening scholars’ impact on the world, as provost at the Graduate Center Joy secured generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to foster public-facing scholarship through innovative experiments in doctoral training. She has published two books with Princeton University Press and over seventy articles, reviews, and short essays. Joy earned a BA from Princeton University in 1991 and a PhD in classical studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997.   

Deirdre d'Albertis

[Deirdre d'Albertis]
Deirdre d'Albertis Dean of Bard College, Professor of English and Review Editor, Nineteenth-Century Contexts.

Lewis R. Gordon

[Lewis R. Gordon]
Lewis R. Gordon is Professor of Philosophy at UCONN-Storrs; Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies; the 2018–2019 Boaventura de Sousa Santos Chair in Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra, Portugal; and Chair of Global Collaborations for the Caribbean Philosophical Association.  His most recent books are his co-edited anthology with Fernanda Frizzo Bragato, Geopolitics and Decolonization: Perspectives from the Global South (London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018), and his forthcoming monograph Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA and Penguin Book in the UK) and his collection of essays 论哲学、去殖民化与种族 (“On Philosophy, Decolonization, and Race”), trans. Li Beilei (Wuhan, China: Wuhan University Press). He also performs music in blues, jazz, and alternative rock bands, and speaks as a public intellectual across the globe. His public Facebook page is: https://www.facebook.com/LewisGordonPhilosopher/ and he is on Twitter @lewgord.

Nacira Guenif-Souilamas
 

[Nacira Guenif-Souilamas
 ]
Nacira Guenif-Souilamas is a Professor of sociology and anthropology at University Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis. She holds a Phd in Sociology from l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and a HDR of l’Institut d’Études Politiques - Sciences Po Paris. In Spring 2019, she was a Visiting Professor at REMESO (Institute of Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society) in Norrköping, Linköping University, Sweden. In 2009, she was a Fulbright fellow at Wellesley College (Sociology) and Columbia University (ICLS (Institute for the Study of Culture, Literature and Society, Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures & Department of Religion) and a Visiting Professor at the Institute of French Studies in NYU. From 2012 till 2015, she was a fellow in two programs of Columbia University at the Center for the Study of Social Difference; Gender, Religion, and Law in Muslim Societies directed by Lila Abu Lughod; and Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance: Feminism and Social Change directed by Judith Butler. Her Phd dissertation was awarded Le prix le Monde de la recherche universitaire and published as Des beurettes aux descendantes d’immigrants nord-africains (Grasset, 2000), paperback edition Des beurettes in 2003, translated in Arabic in 2004. She has co-authored Les féministes et le garçon arabe, (L’Aube, 2004, paperback edition in 2006) and edited La république mise à nu par son immigration, (La Fabrique, 2006). Her last publications;  Restrained equality: a sexualized and gendered color line in Austere histories in European societies. Social exclusion and the contest of colonial memories, Stefan Jonsson and Julia Willén eds. (2017, Routledge); Standing still looking over the artist’s shoulder, in Blackboard, Bouchra Khalili’s solo exhibition bilingual catalog (Jeu de Paume, 2018) and with Manal Altamimi & Tal Dor eds., Rencontres radicales, pour des dialogues féministes décoloniaux, (Cambourakis, collection Sorcière, 2018). Forthcoming: “Racialisation et racisation” chapter for the edited volume Pour un antiracisme politique (La Découverte, 2020) and a bilingual contribution for the 25th Bamako Biennal of Photography catalog entitled L’invisible diaspora.
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She contributes to public debates on im/mobilities, migrations, minorities and discriminations, ethnic and racial in/visibility, sexism and racism, sexualisation and racialisation, de/colonial present. From 2010 till 2019, she was vice-chair of the Islamic Cultures Institute (ICI) in Barbès, a longstanding Arab and Black district of Paris.
 

Eric Kaufmann

[Eric Kaufmann]
Eric Kaufmann is Professor and Assistant Dean of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities (Penguin/Abrams, 2018/19); Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth (Profile Books 2010), The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America (Harvard 2004), The Orange Order (Oxford, 2007) and one other book. He wrote a report for the think tank Demos entitled Changing Places: mapping the white British response to ethnic change (Demos 2014). He is co-editor, among others, of Political Demography (Oxford 2012) and editor of Rethinking Ethnicity: Majority Groups and Dominant Minorities (Routledge 2004). An editor of the journal Nations & Nationalism, he has written for Newsweek International, Foreign Affairs, New Statesman and Prospect magazines and his work has been covered in major newspapers and magazines in the UK and US since 2007.

Amy Schiller

[Amy Schiller]
Amy Schiller researches, writes, and consults at the intersection of political theory and philanthropy. She is currently an Associate Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Her research applies Hannah Arendt and other theorists to contemporary philanthropic practices and discourses to uncover ways in which philanthropy creates and destroys the common world. Alongside her philanthropy commentary, Dr. Schiller's teaching and her writing for The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Prospect, and The Daily Beast have addressed matters of race, gender, popular culture, and electoral politics. She holds a Ph.D. from CUNY Graduate Center and has taught at Brooklyn College and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. 

Ibram Kendi

[Ibram Kendi]
Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is a National Book Award-winning historian, speaker, and author of Stamped From The Beginning. He talks about the reality of racism in America today.

Jennifer Kidwell

[Photo by Ryan Collerd, courtesy of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.]
Photo by Ryan Collerd, courtesy of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
Jennifer Kidwell is a performing artist. Recent projects – Underground Railroad Game (Obie Award, Best New American Theatre Work, Lucille Lortel, Helen Hayes nominations), Home (Bessie Award, Outstanding Production), Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed, I Understand Everything Better (Bessie Award, Outstanding Production), Antigone, Fire Burns Hot: Little Reno!, I Promised Myself to Live Faster, 99 Break-Ups, Dick's Last Stand (Whitney Biennial 2014, as Donelle Woolford), Zinnias: the Life of Clementine Hunter. Pig Iron Theatre Company & Lightning Rod Special company member, Wilma Theater Associated Artist, & JACK co-founder. Published in movement research Performance Journal #45 and hyperallergic.com. 2013 TCG/Fox Resident Actor Fellowship (with PITC), 2015 Leeway Foundation Art & Change Grant, 2016 Pew Fellow, 2017 Independence Fellow.

John H McWhorter

[John H McWhorter]
JOHN MCWHORTER is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, teaching linguistics, Western Civilization and music history. He specializes in language change and language contact, and is the author of The Missing Spanish Creoles, Language Simplicity and Complexity, and most recently The Creole Debate. He has written extensively on issues related to linguistics, race, and other topics for Time, The New York Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic and elsewhere, and is a Contributing Editor for The Atlantic. For the general public he is the author of The Power of Babel, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, The Language Hoax, Words on the Move, Talking Back, Talking Black, and other books, and hosts the Lexicon Valley language podcast at Slate.
 

Shahanna McKinney Baldon

[Shahanna McKinney Baldon]
Shahanna McKinney Baldon (she/her/hers) is an educator and activist from Wisconsin, USA. A former classroom teacher, Shahanna has held leadership roles in Jewish education organizations including synagogue education director and director of Jewish federation high school programs, and public education leadership roles including district Advanced Learning director; Director of Family and Community Engagement, and Chief Diversity Officer, as well as Director of Professional Learning for a consortium of 30 school districts. She currently serves as Project Director for the Edot Midwest Regional Jewish Diversity Collaborative and Special Assistant for Diversity and Inclusion at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) both at the University of Wisconsin. Shahanna was a proud participant and Torah carrier with the Jewish Women of Color Marching delegation at the 2019 Washington, DC national Women's March. [email protected] 

Shany Mor

[Shany Mor]
Dr. Shany Mor is an Associate Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College and a Research Fellow at the Chaikin Center at Haifa University.  This past year, he taught on democracy at Sciences Po in Paris and on foreign policy decision making at the Interdisciplinary College in Herzliya.  He is writing a book on representative democracy.  His essays have been published in Tablet, Haaretz, The Hill, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Fathom, and other outlets.

Nikita Nelin

[Nikita Nelin]
Nikita Nelin (BA, Bard College; MFA, Brooklyn College) is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and immersive journalism. His writing experiments with voice driven narrative in the intersection of memory and imagination, while often referencing the themes of his own emigration experience. His journalism subverts the objective-witness myth and explores ritual, ceremony, alternative community models, and the contemporary culture-at-large through “a perspective from the cultural fringe.” He has written about Standing Rock, Burning Man, education towards individual agency, and socio-cultural sustainability in consumerist and branding practices. His early research focused on the “silenced generations,” Soviet writers and artists rejected by the communist party. He has received the 2018 Dogwood Prize for nonfiction, the 2011 Summer Literary Seminars Prize for nonfiction, the 2010 Sean O’Faolain Prize for short fiction, and was a finalist for the 2018 Dzanc Books Prize as well as the 2017 Restless Books Immigrant Prize. He has taught independently and at Brooklyn College and is a member of the Southern Collective Experience. His work can be found at nikitanelin.com

Marwan Mohammed

[Marwan Mohammed]
Marwan Mohammed is a Sociologist and Research Fellow at the CNRS (France), abd a Visiting Scholar at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY).

Emilio Rojas

[Emilio Rojas]
Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions, writing, and sculpture.  It is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration and poetics of space. He holds an MFA in Performance from SAIC.His research-based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. 
 
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His works have been exhibited in the US, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Austria, England, Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Australia. Besides his artistic practice, Emilio is also a translator, community activist, yoga teacher, and anti-oppression facilitator with queer, migrant and refugee youth. Galeria Jose de la Fuente in Santander, Spain and Gallleriapiú in Bologna, Italy represents Rojas’ work. 
 

Batya Ungar Sargon

[Batya Ungar Sargon]
Batya Ungar Sargon is an award-winning journalist and the opinion editor for the Forward. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and Foreign Policy. Batya is a prolific writer and has become an influential voice among American Jewish progressives, curating a diverse group of writers as well as writing her own column in response to breaking news developments impacting the Jewish community, Israel, and American politics. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

 

Ann Seaton

[Ann Seaton]
Annie Seaton is the Director of the Difference and Media Project at Bard College. B.A., Wellesley College; Ph.D., Harvard University. Visiting scholar, Columbia University; Faculty Publishing Fellow, City University of New York; Du Bois Fellow, Harvard. Assistant professor, English, CUNY. Has lectured at Harvard, Brown University, New York University, SUNY Binghamton, Amherst College. At Bard since 2009.

Adam Shatz

[Adam Shatz]
Adam Shatz is a contributing editor at The London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. He has been a visiting professor at Bard College and New York University and a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars. Raised in Massachusetts, he studied history at Columbia University and has lived in New York City since 1990.

Scott R. Sheppard

[Photo Credit: Lindsay Browning]
Photo Credit: Lindsay Browning
Scott R. Sheppard is an OBIE Award-winning theater artist living in Philadelphia and New York City. He is a Co-Director of Lightning Rod Special. Recent credits: The Appointment (lead writer/performer), Underground Railroad Game (co-creator/perfomer), named by the New York Times in 2018 as one of the top 25 plays in the past 25 years, currently touring nationally and internationally; Pig Iron Theatre Company’s 99 Breakups and Period of Animate Existence (deviser/performer); PITC’s Gentlemen Volunteers (performer); George & Co.’s Holden (co-creator/performer); and Arden Theatre Company’s The Stinky Cheeseman (performer, Barrymore nomination). Scott is a recipient of the Independence Foundation Fellowship, an OBIE for Best New American Theater Work, Edinburgh Fringe First Award. Proud graduate of the inaugural class at Pig Iron’s School Performance and Guild Hall resident artist for 2018. Next up co-creating Nosejob in Drama League Residency for 2019, SPEECH with Misha Chowdhury, and Very Smart and Fragile Boys with Andrew Neisler.

Allison Stanger

[Allison Stanger]
Allison Stanger is the Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, Technology and Human Values Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, New America Cybersecurity Fellow, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy, both with Yale University Press. She is working on a new book tentatively titled Consumers vs. Citizens: Social Inequality and Democracy’s Public Square in a Big Data World. Stanger’s writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post, and she has testified before the Commission on Wartime Contracting, the Senate Budget Committee, the Congressional Oversight Panel, the Senate HELP Committee, and the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University.

Kenneth S. Stern

[Kenneth S. Stern]
Mr. Stern is the director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, a program of Bard’s Human Rights Project. BCSH works to increase the serious study of human hatred, and ways to combat it. The Center supports faculty and students throughout the Bard network and also seeks to impact public discussion about hatred nationally and internationally.
Mr. Stern – a Bard alum – is also an award-winning author and attorney, who was for 25 years the American Jewish Committee’s expert on antisemitism. Mr. Stern has also taught courses on antisemitism at Bard, as a visiting assistant professor of human rights.
 VIEW MORE >>
Mr. Stern’s op-eds and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Forward, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and elsewhere. Mr. Stern has appeared on the CBS Evening News, Dateline, Nightline, the History Channel, PBS, and many other television and radio programs (including Fresh Air and On the Media). He is scheduled to appear in a 2019 PBS documentary by Andrew Goldberg about antisemitism.
He has argued before the United States Supreme Court, testified before Congress (as well as before committees of parliamentarians in Canada and the U.K.), was an invited presenter at the White House Conference on Hate Crimes, and served as a member of the U.S. Delegation to the Stockholm Forum on Combating Intolerance.
Mr. Stern’s report on the militia movement, released 10 days before the Oklahoma City bombing, predicted attacks on the government, and the covering memo to the report said such attacks might occur on April 19, 1995, the anniversary of the deaths of members of the Branch Davidian sect. Mr. Stern’s report was called “prescient,” and his resulting book – A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate – was nominated for the National Book award. Mr. Stern was also an integral part of the defense team in the historic London Holocaust denial case of David Irving vs. Deborah Lipstadt.
Mr. Stern was the lead drafter of the “working definition” of antisemitism now adopted by the U.S. Department of State. In 2017 he testified before the House Committee on the Judiciary, opposing the Antisemitism Awareness Act, arguing it was an unconstitutional and unwise abuse of this definition to suppress pro-Palestinian campus speech.
Mr. Stern was also defense counsel for Dennis Banks, co-founder of the American Indian Movement (chronicled in his award-winning book Loud Hawk: The United States vs. The American Indian Movement), and was co-counsel in a successful libel suit by Jack and Micki Scott against heiress Patricia Hearst. He also represented various organizations advocating for the homeless, enforced environmental laws in New York City, and was director of an organization advocating for victims of terrorism.
Mr. Stern has written extensively on just about every aspect of antisemitism (his two other books are Holocaust Denial and Antisemitism Today), especially on how institutions should understand and approach the topic. He has trained over 200 college and university presidents on how to respond to instances of bigotry on campus, and helped establish courses and programs on the study of hate at Gonzaga University and at Bard College. He is completing a book entitled The Conflict Over The Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate. His writings about antisemitism and hatred can be found here.
 

Mebrak Tareke

[Mebrak Tareke]
Mebrak Tareke is a writer and a content strategy advisor with over 15 years of broad experience across digital storytelling, public relations and marketing for social change. Mebrak is building a creative agency that will shape the future of storytelling. She is architecting new African futures that disinvent the past. Mebrak works across print, digital, and immersive media to change how we experience the world around us. She has worked for tech start-ups, non-profits and art institutions. She has also written for Hyperallergic, Kilimanjaro, and the NEW INC Stream. Mebrak has also curated award-winning shows on Artsy, at cutlog NY, and Spring Break Art Show. She has even led content and strategy for multiple global communications projects at the United Nations, Play Bac Presse and virtual museums, working in Europe, Africa and North America. Mebrak was born in Addis Ababa and currently works in between New York and Mexico City. She holds a Master of Sciences in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Bachelor of Arts In Modern European Studies from University College London.

Eric Ward

[Eric Ward]
Eric K. Ward is the Executive Director at the Western States Center. He is a national expert on the relationship between hate violence and preserving democratic institutions, governance, and inclusive societies, Eric brings nearly 30 years of expertise in community organizing and philanthropy to his role as Western States Center’s Executive Director.
Originally from Los Angeles, Eric began his civil rights work when the white nationalist movement was engaged in violent paramilitary activity that sought to undermine democratic governance in the Pacific Northwest. Eric founded and directed a community project to expose and counter hate groups and respond to bigoted violence with the Community Alliance of Lane County (1990–1994). With the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment (1994-2002) Eric worked with government leaders, civil rights campaigners, businesses leaders, and law enforcement officials to establish over 120 task forces in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming. As one of a handful of prominent leaders of color working to counter this new manifestation of organized hate, Eric successfully encouraged some violent neo-Nazi leaders to renounce racism and violence. Joining the Center for New Community as National Field Director (2003-2011), Eric assisted immigrant rights advocates in addressing the growing influence of xenophobia on public policy.
 

Thomas Chatterton Williams

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]
Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of a memoir, Losing My Cool (2010, Penguin Press) and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, The London Review of Books and many other places. He is the recipient of a Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin and is a 2019 New America Fellow. He is currently at work on a book, rooted in his experience as the black father of two white-looking children in Paris, that will reckon with the ways in which we construct race in America. 

Marc Weitzmann

[Marc Weitzmann]
Weitzmann is the author of 12 books, including seven novels.[2] His books deal with father and son relationship , as well as topics like globalization, terrorism, identity politics and social atomization.
During the summer 2014, Weitzmann wrote for Tablet Magazine "France's Toxic Hate", a series of reporting on the rise of antisemitism in his country that won the Berman Prize for literary Journalism in London in February 2015. in January 2015, at Philip Roth's suggestion, Weitzmann began a book based on those reportings. The beginning of an unprecedented terror wave that same month in France changed the scope of the initial project to a major work in two languages.
The US version, "Hate", was released March 12, 2019 by Houghton-Mifflin. In the Wall Street Journal, James Kirchick described it as "an excellent and chilling report-cum-memoir about one of the most unsettling phenomena in contemporary Europe” and Roger Cohen in the NYTBR as "an often illuminating intensity as it grapples with an unresolved French and European quandary." The book is a New York Time Book Review Editor's choice.

Ruth Wisse

[Ruth Wisse]
Preeminent teacher and scholar Ruth Wisse recently retired from her position as Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, and is currently the Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Tikvah Fund. Her books on literary subjects include an edition of Jacob Glatstein’s two-volume fictional memoir, The Glatstein Chronicles, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Literature and Culture, and A Little Love in Big Manhattan. She is also the author of two political studies, If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews and Jews and Power. Her most recent book, No Joke: Making Jewish Humor, a volume in the Tikvah Fund’s Library of Jewish Ideas, was published by Princeton University Press.

Registration

Can't Make It? Watch the Live Webcast.

[Can't Make It? Watch the Live Webcast.]


REGISTER FOR THE WEBCAST

Schedule

Thursday, October 10th, 2019

10:00 am: Introduction
Deirdre d'Albertis
 
10:15 am: Racism and Antisemitism
        Roger Berkowitz

10:30 am: What is Racism?
        John McWhorter
        Moderator: Robert Boyers and Reverend Jacqui Lewis
 
11:50 am: Break

12:00 pm: How Antisemitism Animates White Nationalism
        Eric Ward
        Moderator: Ken Stern

1:00 pm: Lunch
 
1:15 pm - 2:00 pm Breakout Sessions (OPTIONAL)
 
Breakout Session 1: Olin Room 203
Voices from the American Jewish Peace Archive on Israel and Anti-Semitism
Moderator: Aliza Becker
Breakout Session 2: Olin Room 205
Should We Retire From Race?
Moderator: Thomas Chatterton Williams and Robert Boyers
 
1:15 pm: Walking Tour *required advance rsvp
Meeting Roger Berkowitz outside Olin Hall on the side patio behind the merchandise table. Not the side patio with the tables & chairs. 
 
2:00 pm: Little Rock: Arendt and Race
      Katheryn Belle and Lewis Gordon
      Moderator: Roger Berkowitz

3:00 pm: Burden or Blessing?” A performance/lecture.
      Emilio Rojas
      Moderator: Nana Adusei-Poku

3:30 pm: The Underground Railroad and The Racial Imaginary
      Jennifer Kidwell and Scott Sheppard
      Moderator: Roger Berkowitz and Kenyon Adams

4:30 pm: Break

5:00 pm: Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities
      Eric Kaufmann
      Moderator: Samantha Hill

6:00 pm:  Who Needs Antisemitism?
       Ruth Wisse
       Moderators: Shany Mor and Batya Ungar Sargon

6:45 pm: END --Wine and Cheese Reception

Friday, October 11th, 2019

8:30 am: Breakout Session (OPTIONAL)

Wresting with Antisemitism and Racism: Oral Histories of Pittsburghers after the Synagogue Shooting
Moderators: Aliza Becker and Noah Schoen
Olin Room, Room 204

9:30 am: Introduction
      Leon Botstein
      Allison Stanger

9:45 am: How To Be An Antiracist 
      Ibram X. Kendi
      Moderator: Allison Stanger
 
11:00 am Racism and Zionism: Black and Jewish Relations 
       Reverend Jacqui Lewis, Batya Ungar Sargon, Shahanna McKinney-Baldon and Anne Seaton
       Moderator: Amy Schiller

12:30 pm: The Great Replacement
        Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, Adam Shatz, Marwan Mohammed, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Marc Weitzmann
        Moderator: Ian Buruma
 
1:30  pm: Lunch
 
1:45 pm - 2:30 pm Breakout Sessions (OPTIONAL)
 
Breakout Session 1: OLIN Room 204
Expanded Epistemologies & the Art of Disinvention
Kenyon Adams and Mebrak Tareke
Breakout Session 2: OLIN Room 205
Both-Sideism: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Other People's Opinions in the Age of Trump
Batya Ungar Sargon

2:00 pm: Meditation at Hannah Arendt's gravesite. Meet outside Olin Hall on the side patio behind the Merchandise Table. Not the patio with the tables & chairs. RSVP not required. 
 
2:30 pm: What is the New Racism?
      Etienne Balibar
      Moderator: Nana Adusei-Poku

3:30 pm: Are “they” us?: The Intellectuals’ Role in Creating Division
      Peter Baehr
      Moderator: Peter Rosenblum

4:15 pm: Can We "Retire" From Race?
                Thomas Chatterton Williams in discussion with Bard Students: 
Skye Carter
Elizaveta Skorobogatova
Justyn Diaz
Lourdes Garcia
        Moderator: Joy Connolly

5:30 pm: END -- Wine and Cheese Reception. NOTE: There will be a final walking tour at the conclusion of the conference. Meet Samantha Hill outside Olin Hall on the side patio. This is the patio closest to Campus Road. Advance RSVP not required.
 

UNDERGROUND RAILROAD GAME 

[UNDERGROUND RAILROAD GAME ]
Hannah Arendt Center and Fisher Center Present

THE ARS NOVA PRODUCTION OF
UNDERGROUND RAILROAD GAME

by Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R. Sheppard with Lightning Rod Special
Directed by Taibi Magar
Produced by Octopus Theatricals

Good morning, America! Welcome to Hanover Middle School, where a pair of teachers are getting down and dirty with today’s lesson. The nimble duo goes round after round on the mat of our nation’s history, tackling race, sex, and power in this R-rated, kaleidoscopic, and fearless comedy. Lauded around the world and in the New York Times as “one of the best new American plays of the last 25 years,” Underground Railroad Game welcomes back Jennifer Kidwell, last seen in SummerScape 2016’s Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed.

Underground Railroad Game contains sexually explicit material, strong language, and mature themes and is recommended for adventurous audiences ages 18 and up. 

PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE
October 9 at 7:30 pm
October 10 at 7:30 pm
October 11 at 7:30 pm
October 12 at 7:30 pm

LOCATION
Fisher Center, LUMA Theater

Tickets start at $25
$5 tickets for Bard undergraduate students are made possible by the Passloff Pass.
 
HOW TO PURCHASE TICKETS:
Conference Registrants must purchase tickets through the Fisher Center for Performing Arts. Registering for the conference does not reserve ticket(s) to attend the performance. Tickets go on sale to the general public on August 12.

ONLINE
Access the Fisher Center's events listing, learn more, and purchase tickets.

BY PHONE
To speak with a ticket agent, call 845-758-7900, Monday through Friday, from 10 am to 5 pm.
Please have your credit card information ready when you call.

IN PERSON
The Fisher Center's main box office, located in the lobby of the Sosnoff Theater, is open Monday through Friday, from 10 am to 5 pm, and one hour before each scheduled event in the lobby of the venue. Advance sales and ticket exchanges are not available one hour prior to curtain.

Readings

In anticipation of this year's annual fall conference, we have created a reading list by some of our invited conference speakers. So, before you join us at Bard College, catch up on their research and immerse yourself in a diverse range of viewpoints.

Download the complete Conference Anthology.  You may also select individual articles from the list below.
Please note, some of the articles listed may be behind a paywall. If you do not have the required subscription, please download the Conference Anthology at the link above.
 
Etienne Balibar
PDF: Race, Nation, Class

Kenyon Victor Adams
Article: Louis Armstrong House Museum Hires a New Director to Guide Expansion Project

Nylah Burton
Article: Alice Walker’s Terrible Anti-Semitic Poem Felt Personal — to Her and to Me

Bob Boyers
Article: The Academy’s Assault on Intellectual Diversity

Ibram Kendi
Article: How to be an Antiracist

Jennifer Kidwell and Scott Sheppard
Article: Playing a ‘Game’ to Reveal Uncomfortable Truths About Race
Article: Playing Underground

Batya Ungar-Sargon
Article: The Left Is Making Jews Choose: Our Progressive Values Or Ourselves
Article: Why Don’t Jews Realize How Dangerous Anti-BDS Laws Are?

John McWhorter
Book: Talking Back, Talking Black
Articler: The Virtue Signalers Won’t Change the World

Emilio Rojas
Video: Spite

Thomas Chatterton Williams
Book: Losing My Cool
Article: The French Origins of “You Will Not Replace Us”

Eric Ward
Article: Skin in the Game: How Antisemitism Animates White Nationalism

Ruth Wisse
Video: Anti-Semitism and Why It Matters

Eric Kaufmann
Book: Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities

Peter Baehr
Image of the Veil in Social Theory

Location

Getting Here

[Getting Here]
Bard College's main campus is located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, on the east bank of the Hudson River, about 90 miles north of New York City, 50 miles south of Albany, NY, and 220 miles southwest of Boston. The Conference takes place in Olin Auditorium in the Olin Humanities Building (C3 on the Bard Map). 
 

Franklin W. Olin Humanities Building
Olin Concert Hall 
35 Henderson Cir Dr
Annandale-On-Hudson, NY 12504

If you are driving, take Rt. 9G and enter onto campus using the west entrance with the stone sign for Bard College across from the Anne Cox Chambers Alumni/ae Center at Bard. After turning into Bard College, make a left at the Stop Sign, and Olin Hall will be on your right. Additionally, a security guard will be available at the Main Entrance to Bard College between 8:30 am and 11:00 am to assist drivers. Also, please check out Travel to Bard for more helpful hints.

Accommodations

[Accommodations]
A comprehensive list of nearby hotels, inns, and B & B’s may be found on the Bard webpage, HERE. Please review this list. We recommend booking your accommodations and restaurant dining as soon as possible. We do not offer housing options on campus for guests. There are several Airbnb options in the nearby towns; Red Hook and Tivoli. Please be prepared to use Uber, Lyft, and Taxis to get around. Note: The roads surrounding Bard College are not walkable and due to the rural area, local transport is limited. Please keep this in mind when planning your stay. Still need help? Check out visiting Bard College for more helpful hints, click here.

Local hotels offering a Bard Rate during the conference: 
 
The Best Western Plus in Kingston, NY. To make reservations using the Bard discount, you must call the hotel direct at 845-338-0400, Monday–Friday from 9AM–5PM and ask for the “Bard College Discount.” We recommend booking your accommodations as early as possible.

Bard College Holiday Inn Express Kingston To make a reservation, click on this link and use Corporate ID # 100252712. Or, call 845-336-6200. Holiday Inn Express Kingston 1835 Ulster Ave Lake Katrine, NY 12449.

Parking Is Free

[Parking Is Free]
There are two main parking lots; One across from Olin and one south of Olin Hall -- Please park in either lot. Additionally, you may also park in the gravel lot across from the Stevenson Gymnasium off of Annandale Road. Please click HERE to see the venue map. The black objects represent Parking Lots.

Media

Press Inquiries*

Please contact:
Mark Primoff, Director of Communications
Bard College
845-758-7412
[email protected]

*Once you have been verified, you may register for free.

Debate

While people of color make up about 30% of the US population, they account for 60% of those imprisoned in the US. One in three black men in the United States can expect to go to prison in his lifetime. Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, challenges the civil rights community—and all of us—to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America. Thus the question presents itself to us – what should happen to the US prison system? While many fight for reform, others argue for abolition. Thus, we present a public debate:
 
The US Prison System: Abolition or Reform?
 
Bard vs. West Point

Monday, October 7, 2019
7:00pm
Campus Center Multi-Purpose Room

Co-sponsored by the Bard Debate Union, the Center for Civic Engagement, and the Bard-West Point Exchange.
This event occurred on:  Racism and Antisemitism
A Conference Sponsored by
The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.
Thursday and Friday, Oct. 10-11, 2019

Watch the Webcast Now


“Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world, and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization.”
—Hannah Arendt
 
When Hannah Arendt sat down to write The Origins of Totalitarianism after spending over 10 years in exile, she began with a history of antisemitism. In order to understand the horrific emergence of totalitarianism, she had to confront the question of why the Jewish people had been targeted. She found the common sense explanation—that Jews were scapegoats—to be wrong. The scapegoat explanation, she writes, was “one of the principal attempts to escape the seriousness of antisemitism and the significance of the fact that the Jews were driven into the storm of the center of events.”

Instead, Arendt argued that political antisemitism is more than Jew-hatred; rather, it is a pseudo-scientific ideology seeking to prove that Jews are responsible for all evils of the world. In its social form, anti-Semitism unleashed the fantasy of 'the Jew' in general as the foreigner. The social fantasy of 'the Jew' forced upon Jews a terrible choice between being a parvenu who rejects their Jewishness and assimilates, or a pariah defined by their Jewishness. In its political form, antisemitism is a form of racial ideology that justifies oppression and even annihilation of Jews as foreigners who are the key to problems of the world.

Although Arendt is often accused of ignoring her Jewish identity, her work is consistently attentive to the Jewish question beginning with her early writing on Rahel Varnhagen, where she argues that Jews were faced with the cruel choice of becoming parvenus or pariahs. Captured by Nazis twice, forced to flee first to Germany and then to occupied France, she thought about how one could live in the world as a refugee and foreigner. One could either try to assimilate and cast off their history, or they could choose to carry their identity with them through the world and embrace their otherness. The former she wrote in “We Refugees” were destined to become Ulysses like wanderers, while the later had a chance at finding a form of peace in an unsettled world. Arendt’s sharp distinction between pariahs and parvenus reflects her understanding of antisemitism and totalitarianism; ideologically antisemitism had partially been so successful because Jewish people were already freely shedding their Jewish identity, and she refused to do this.

When Arendt came to the United States as a stateless refugee, she began writing for small Jewish journals, and reflected upon the similarities and differences between racism in American and antisemitism in Europe. She called slavery the original sin of the America and called for a Constitutional amendment explicitly recognizing African Americans as full members of the American Republic. Arendt argued that racism is an ideology like antisemitism. It offers a pseudo-scientific justification for violence that elevates one group at the expense of another. And imagining that racial differences must lead to a race war means that “Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world, and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization.”

In writing about racism in America, however, Arendt consistently made arguments that rubbed many in the Civil Rights community the wrong way. She distinguishes racism from race-thinking, which is a form of prejudice. Racial prejudice exists, like all prejudices, as “an integral part of those human affairs that are the context in which we go about our daily lives.” She said clearly that racial prejudices are “probably wrong” and “certainly pernicious”, but she also argued that they must be taken seriously as opinions. Racism, on the other hand, is an ideology that justifies political oppression and “differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe.’

From The Origins of Totalitarianism to The Crises in Little Rock Arendt’s thinking on race is controversial and has often led many to quickly dismiss her thoughts on race and antisemitism entirely. The Hannah Arendt Center’s 12th annual conference on “Racism and Antisemitism” will explore these oft shunned concepts in Arendt’s work in the context of our contemporary political moment which is marked by antisemitic and racist violence.

Our conference will consider the following questions:
 
• What is Racism?  
• Is antisemitism a form of racism?
• What does anti-racism mean today?
• Is it antisemitic to criticize the state of Israel?
• Is equality possible in a world where prejudice exists?
• How can we respond to racist fantasies?

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