Zionislandology

press release: Lunch is provided and seats are limited. Please RSVP: rsvp@humanities.wisc.edu 

Beginning with Hannah Arendt’s well-known distinction between medieval, religious Jew-hatred and modern, secular antisemitism, this in-person Friday Lunch talk reconsiders contemporary debates concerning the periodization of race, religion, and settler colonialism. The discussion follows Arendt’s terms into more recent historiographical writing by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (Jewish history), Geraldine Heng (race in the Middle Ages), and Patrick Wolfe (colonization). It concludes by speculating on how this constellation of figures and texts can contribute to a theological-political genealogy of Zionism as a form of island-thinking.

Adam Stern is an assistant professor of German and Jewish Studies at UW-Madison. His first book, Survival: A Theological-Political Genealogy, was published with the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2021. Recent work has appeared in journals such as CR: The New Centennial Review, Modern Intellectual History, Critical Times, and Theory & Event. He is currently working on a new book-length project, tentatively titled: Settlers, Natives, Jews.