Brian Klug analyses the controversy around antisemitism in the Labour Party and the limits on the criticism of Zionism. In July 2018 a storm of controversy broke out in the UK when the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the Labour Party published a draft code of conduct to tackle antisemitism. Ostensibly, the controversy was about Labour's failure to adopt the definition of antisemitism formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in May 2016, substituting its own definition instead. This, however, was just the tip of the iceberg. This talk will critically examine the charge made against the NEC and explore the complex issues lying under the surface of the controversy. Particular attention will be given to the role played by the public debate over Zionism, Israel and Palestine.

About the speaker

Brian Klug is senior research fellow and tutor in philosophy at St. Benet's Hall. He is also an honorary fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton and fellow of the College, Saint Xavier University, Chicago. He is the author, among many works, of Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life and Offence: The Jewish Case.

Orna Sasson-Levy discusses the cast of women soldiers who decide to speak Women's military service has dual meanings: on the one hand, it includes women in the institution of citizenship and enhances their feelings of belonging to the national collective. On the other hand, the women's encounter with the state at such a formative time, becomes an initiation process into gendered citizenship, where the women learn their (marginal) place vis-à-vis the state.

The aim of my paper is to analyze women soldiers' testimonies about their military service to the anti-occupation movement "Breaking the Silence". The lecture will open with introducing three analytical concepts that help us understand better women's encounters with the state: Multi-level contracts, Contrasting gendered experiences and Dis/acknowledging violence. The second part will employ these concepts to analyze the soldiers' testimonies, and explore what they teach us about the link between women's military service, women's political voice, and gendered citizenship.

Adriana Jacobs (Oxford) discusses the role of translation in the constitutive era of modern Hebrew literature. In the early decades of the twentieth century, as the European literary enclaves of Hebrew literature began to move and consolidate their operations in Palestine, translation reinforced its status as a major, indispensable component of modern Hebrew literary production. In this talk, I will discuss the Hebrew translation economy in Mandatory Palestine and specifically address the role that the translation of poetry played in the development of Hebrew as a national literary language. Drawing my examples from the 1942 anthology, Shirat rusiya (Russian Poetry), I will show how Hebrew poet-translators engaged literary translation as a mode that simultaneously supported and unsettled the nation-building project.

David Tal discusses the making and history of US-Israel relationships. In December 1962 President John F. Kennedy told Israel’s foreign minister, Golda Meir that “the United States has a special relationship with Israel in the Middle East really comparable only to that which it has with Britain.” While agreeing that indeed, the Israeli- American relations could be labelled as ‘special,’ most students of American- Israeli relations argued over the question since when the Israeli-American relationship became really special, and what was it that made them “special.” The debate took place between students of the realistic school of thought, who argued that only after the 1967 war, or after the 1970 Black September events in Jordan that Israel became a strategic asset for the United States, and it was since than that the relations between the two countries became ‘special’. The proponents of the idealistic school of thought argue that idealism and religion were the determining factors that decided American special attitude toward Israel. While both realism and idealism existed in the American – Israel relationship, it was applied differently by each state. While the American approach toward Israel was mostly idealistic, based on religion, idealism and history, the Zionist and later Israeli approach toward the United States was realistic.

Yakov Rabkin (University of Montreal) discusses the roots of Israeli political culture in the Zionist beginnings in the Yiddish speaking regions of the Russian Empire.

Yaacov Yadgar discusses the recently passed Basic-Law: Israel the Nation State of the Jewish People, and discusses how it plays into Israel's Jewish Identity Crisis

Kfir Cohen discusses Israeli literature as global literature (broadly defined)

Bashir Abu-Manneh discusses Emile Habibi’s The Pessoptimist and 1948.

Rami Ginat discusses the Egyptian Communist Party's stance on Israel in its formative first decade of statehood.

Faisal Devji discusses the surprising relations between Pakistani nationalism and Zionism.