RESCHEDULED TO THURSDAY, JANUARY 11, 7:30 PM in the BAI sanctuary
Light refreshments will be served after the talk.
Since the Hamas invasion of Israel October 7, many American Jews have been increasingly concerned by the sharp rise in expressions of enmity toward our community, with many evoking frightening comparisons to the Holocaust. Are there serious signs that what German Jews experienced beginning in the 1930s may await their descendants in America today? How concerned should American Jews be?
A senior historian will look at current indicators, compare them with earlier troubling times, and examine contemporary fears from a long-term perspective. Q&A will follow the presentation.
About our speaker, David Engel
David served from 1991 to 2022 as professor of history, Hebrew, and Judaic Studies at New York University, where he held the Skirball Chair in Modern Jewish History and the Greenberg Professorship in Holocaust Studies. Before coming to NYU he was a member of the teaching faculty at Tel Aviv University, and remained a Senior Fellow of TAU’s Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center through 2016.  Engel is the author of nine books and more than 100 scholarly research articles on various aspects of modern Jewish political and intellectual history, including Zionism: A Short History of a Big Idea, and The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews, a widely used university textbook now in its third edition. In 2020 the Historical Association of Israel honored him by devoting four full issues of its journal to discussion of his canonical article, “Away from a Definition of Antisemitism.” An English-language volume devoted to the same article, entitled Antisemitism and the Politics of History, was recently released by Brandeis University Press.
Engel was named Outstanding Lecturer at Tel Aviv University in 1987 and received awards for teaching excellence at NYU. He was a longtime member of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and served as a historical consultant for the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. His current research concerns how Jews have identified and thought about threats to their security over the centuries and how they have endeavored to maximize their safety and wellbeing. His lecture draws on that research.
This event is sponsored by Beth Am Israel Life-long Learning Committee.
