This week on Times Will Tell we’re speaking with Prof. Alvin Rosenfeld, the director of Indiana University’s Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.

Prof. Rosenfeld founded the Jewish Studies program at Indiana University some 50 years ago and served as its director for 30 years. But retirement has eluded Rosenfeld and in 2009 he founded the Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism after observing the rise of anti-Jewish hostility all over the world.

"The last time I saw Elie [Weisel] shortly before he died, he was very downcast... He looked at me and he said, 'I've failed... Look at the rise of antisemitism today.' So he thought, I thought, we all thought that the more people come to know about the persecution and mass murder of the Jews the more reluctant anyone would be to speak hostilely against Jews in the public sphere. But we were simply wrong," said Rosenfeld. 

And while early in his career he was able to concentrate on poets William Blake and John Wheelwright, Prof. Rosenfeld’s recent work deals with antisemitism, Holocaust literature and memory, including the 2011 book “The End of the Holocaust," and the 2021 collection of essays “Contending with Antisemitism in a Rapidly Changing Political Climate.” 

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IMAGE: Indiana University Prof. Alvin Rosenfeld, December 2022. (Gale Nichols)

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