LBI London

Dr. Brian Klug 

University of Oxford, UK

Generally speaking, the British left has been on the side of the disadvantaged and the oppressed. Forthis reason, socialists,radicals and liberals have instinctively rallied to the cause of newcomers in an increasingly multicultural society. But circumstances have changed and the waters now are muddied. 

This lecture will explore the reasons why it is difficult forthe left today, given its origins and orientations, to deal with Muslim and Jewish difference when that difference is asserted by Jews and Muslims themselves. 

Brian Klug is Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St Benet’s Hall, Oxford. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish and non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton, and in summer 2012 was Visiting Scholar at the International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding, University of South Australia. His latest two books are Being Jewish and Doing Justice(2011) and Offence: The Jewish Case(2009).

Prof. David Fraser

University of Nottingham, UK 

From 1940 to 1945 the Channel Islands were the only part of Britain to fall under Nazi occupation. German anti-Jewish decrees became part of the Islands’ legal structures. Local police and government officials identified and registered the few remaining Jews.Jewish property was Aryanized and Jews were deported, all with the knowing involvement of government officials who remained officially loyal to the British Crown. This lecture examines both the legal and moral failures and the ambiguities which surrounded this little known part of British Jewish history. 

David Fraser is Professor of Law and Social Theory at the University of Nottingham. His research examines the intersections of law and the Shoah. In addition to his study of the Channel islands, his recent publications include, The Fragility of Law: Constitutional Patriotism and the Jews of Belgium,1940-1945 (2009) and Daviborshch’s Cart: Narrating the Holocaust in Australian War Crimes Trials(2010)

European Leo Baeck Lecture Series London 2011

24 May 2011, 7pm at the German Historical Institute

Claims about Jewish intellectual superiority surface regularly even in the 21st century. Modern genetics, it is claimed, prove that being smart is a singular component of “being Jewish”. Can it be a bad thing to be thought to be smart? The claim reveals itself to be a form of insidious philosemitism, a form of antisemitism, which has traditionally masked itself as being supportive of the Jews. Often it is your supposed friends that you have to worry about most.

Sander L. Gilman is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. He is the author or editor of over eighty books. Obesity: The Biography appeared with Oxford University Press (2010); his most recent edited volume is Wagner and Cinema (with Jeongwon Joe, 2010). He is the author of the basic study of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane (1982), as well as Jewish Self-Hatred (1986). For 25 years he was a member of the humanities and medical faculties at Cornell University where he held the Goldwin Smith Professorship of Humane Studies.