The video of the second webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative is now available and can be viewed here. Titled “Historians on Ideology and Politics in the 1948 War: October 7 and the Aftershocks of World War II,” the webinar featured historians Jeffrey Herf, Matthias Küntzel, and Benny Morris. Their conversation was moderated by Israel initiative director Gabriel Noah Brahm.
The next webinar in the Israel webinar series will take place on March 7.
Presenters
Jeffrey Herf is the author of a distinctive body of historical research that consistently vindicates the values of democracy, liberalism and Zionism over fascism, Stalinism and antisemitism. His many books include Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge 1986), War by Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance and the Battle of the Euromissiles (The Free Press 1991), Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Harvard 1997), The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard 2006), Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale 2009), Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967–1989 (Cambridge 2016), Israel’s Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State (Cambridge 2022), and Three Face of Antisemitism: Right, Left and Islamist (Routledge 2024). Dr. Herf is Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus, University of Maryland, College Park. Before coming to Maryland he taught at Harvard, Ohio State, and Emory.
Matthias Küntzel is a noted political scientist and historian based in Hamburg, Germany, much heralded for his work’s staunch resistance to the ongoing presence of a Nazi past in the present of today’s most urgently pressing conflicts. Between 2004 and 2015, he was an external research associate at the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Dr. Küntzel is the author of several books, including Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (Telos 2009), Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold (Telos 2014), and his most recent Nazism, Islamic Antisemitism, and the Middle East: The 1948 Arab War against Israel and the Aftershocks of World War II (Routledge 2023). For additional information see www.matthiaskuentzel.net.
Benny Morris is the world’s leading historian of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No stranger to controversy, his iconoclastic, pathbreaking research has transformed understandings of the modern Middle East, several times, first with The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge 1988), again with 1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War (Yale 2008), and most recently The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924, co-authored with Dror Ze’evi (Harvard 2019). He is author, as well, of a number of other books, most prominently, the celebrated Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist–Arab Conflict, 1881–1999 (Knopf 1999), numerous occasional essays and opinion-editorials garnering widespread international attention among a diverse audience of intellectuals and interested readers at large. His most recent work is a biographical study, Sidney Reilly: Master Spy (Yale 2022). Having achieved celebrity status as perhaps the Jewish state’s most formidable public intellectual, Dr. Morris is also Professor Emeritus, Department of Middle East Studies, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
Moderator
Gabriel Noah Brahm (aka Gavriel Ben-Zion Abramovich) is Professor of English and World Literature at Northern Michigan University, Founding Director of Michigan’s Center for Academic and Intellectual Freedom (CAIF), and currently serves as the Hochberg Family Library Scholar-in-Residence at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) in Miami Beach, Florida. Dr. Brahm has been appointed as a visiting scholar at the University of Haifa’s Herzl Institute for the Study of Zionism, the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University, the Program in Philosophy and Religions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Yad Vashem (World Holocaust Remembrance Center). He is co-editor (with Cary Nelson) of The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel, and a frequent contributor to such leading journals of social theory and political commentary as Telos, Fathom, The American Mind, Society, and Perspectives on Political Science. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @Brahmski.
