International Conference
Jews Out of the Question.
Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism:
Reception in Current Research
June 28, 2024, Katholische Akademie in Berlin
© Cover: Jews Out of the Question. Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism, Sunypress
Jews Out of the Question. Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism: Reception in Current Research
International Conference
June 28, 2024, Katholische Akademie in Berlin
In post-Holocaust culture, anti-Semitism has come to be seen as absolute evil. Elad Lapidot’s Jews Out of the Question. Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism (SUNY 2020) examined the role that opposition to anti-Semitism has played in shaping contemporary political thought. Lapidot argued that contemporary thought identifies the evil of anti-Semitic thought not in thinking against Jews, but in thinking of Jews. What is denounced as anti-Semitic is the figure of “the Jew” in thought.
Lapidot revealed how, paradoxically, opposition to anti-Semitism generated a rejection of Jewish thought in post-Holocaust thought. Through critical readings of authors such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Sartre, Arendt, Badiou, and Nancy, the book contended that by rejecting Jewish thought, opposition to anti-Semitism comes dangerously close to anti-Semitism. At the foundation of this rejection he identified a problematic understanding of the relations between politics and thought—a troubling political epistemology.
This workshop brings together young researchers, who will discuss the various ways in which Jews Out of the Question contributes to their own research projects, aspects that inspire them in their own investigation, elements that raise for them questions, difficulties and concerns, and points of contention or critique that they develop in their respective reflections.
Organisation
Prof. Dr. Elad Lapidot
Katholische Akademie Berlin
Program
This is a non public conference
| June 28, 2024 | Katholische Akademie in Berlin 3rd floor, Seminarraum 5 |
| 9:30–10:00 | Reception |
| Session I | Opening |
| 10:00–11:30 | Yael Attia Hannah Tzuberi Rachel Pafe |
| Session II | |
| 12:00–13:30 | Jacob Levi Julie Reich Quentin Le Gurun |
| Session III | |
| 15:00–16:30 | Matan Gurevitz Abeer Khshiboon Emily Dische-Becker |
Participants
Yael Attia is a doctoral fellow at the RTG Minor Cosmopolitanisms. In her current project, The (post)colonial Other of Modern Jewish Thought, she seeks to trace the constitutive role of Jewish colonial experiences in North Africa as formative to modern Jewish political thinking, as it emerged in a series of Francophone intellectuals: Hélène Cixous, Albert Memmi and Jacques Derrida. She also hosts the official podcast of her program. An edited volume she co-edited, titled: Minor Perspectives on Modernity: Jewish Studies and Decolonial Thought is forthcoming from Nomos Verlag.
Matan Gurevitz is pursuing his Ph.D. on the intersections of anticolonial motives in Weimar and post-war French Jewish thought. He is an ELES research fellow and a member of the research group Revisiting Shared Traditions: Judaism and Islam in a post-secular Perspective at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He studied music, musicology, and Jewish intellectual and cultural history at the Berlin University of the Arts (UDK), the Humboldt University in Berlin, the University of Heidelberg, and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris (EHESS).
Abeer Khshiboon is a doctoral candidate in theology at the Humboldt University of Berlin, researching the historical trauma of internally displaced Palestinians. She comes from backgrounds in political theology, Jewish studies, education, and psychology. Her interests revolve around oral traditions of Indigenous peoples, decolonial theories and methods, memory studies, and the infrapolitics of the rightless.
Elad Lapidot is professor for Culture Studies at the University of Lille, France. He specializes in philosophy, Jewish thought and Talmud and was teaching at the University of Bern, Switzerland, the Humboldt Universität Berlin and the Freie Univeristät Berlin. His work is guided by questions concerning the relation between knowledge and politics. Among his publications: Jews Out of the Question. A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism (SUNY Press, 2020), Hebrew translation with introduction and commentary of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, Vol. 1 (Resling, 2020), Heidegger and Jewish Thought. Difficult Others, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and Etre sans mot dire : La logiqe de ‘Sein und Zeit’ (Zeta Books, 2010).
Quentin Le Gurun is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Lille. His research, under the supervision of Prof Elad Lapidot, focuses on the postmodern Jewish question in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Benny Lévy, namely the epistemo-political stakes involved in the profound reconfiguration of the relation between philosophy and Judaism in French thought of the second half of the 20th-century. He previously studied at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, devoting his research to the meaning of prophecy in literature and philosophy in the context of Franco- Judaism, particularly in Charles Péguy, Bernard Lazare and James Darmesteter.
Jacob Levi is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Centre d’Études en Civilisations, Langues et Lettres Étrangères at the University of Lille, and Visiting Professor of Teaching in the French and Francophone Department at Connecticut College. His research focuses on questions of language, representation, and translation in 20th century European literature and philosophy, with a focus on Jewish identity in post-war France. Jacob’s current book project, Exile, Adventure, and the Book: Judéité in Post-War French Thought, is an intellectual history of French-Jewish thinkers Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Edmond Jabès.
Rachel Pafe is a writer and researcher interested in modern German-Jewish thought between fiction and philosophy and interdisciplinary theories of mourning. Much of her work is based on collaboration across disciplines, including teaching, reading groups, and publication projects with artists, religious historians, philosophers, and game designers. She is the editor of three multidisciplinary collections of poetry, criticism, and fiction, Reading Scholem in Constellation (2021, Pseudo Press), Reading Taubes in Constellation (2022, Pseudo Press), and Reading Kofman in Constellation (2023, Pseudo Press) and currently a PhD candidate in modern Jewish philosophy at Goethe University of Frankfurt and University of Lille.
Julie Reich is a PhD candidate at the university of Lille under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Elad Lapidot. My research focusses on the mutual influences of feminism and Jewish Thought and the way gender conceptions influenced political Jewish philosophy in the context of pre-war Germany and post-war France. I am interested in religious philosophy, political philosophy, feminism, decolonial thought and concepts of citizenship in Jewish thought. Previously, I studied comparative literature and philosophy in Berlin, Madrid and Jerusalem. Additionally, I work as a freelance educator and language teacher.
Hannah Tzuberi studied Jewish Studies and Islamic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and was a research assistant at the Institute for Jewish Studies (FU Berlin). Currently she is a post-doctoral researcher in a collaborative research project “Beyond Social Cohesion. Global Repertoires of Living Together” (RePLITO) at the FU Berlin, directed by Prof. Schirin Amir-Moazami. She is the co-editor of “Jewish Friends: Contemporary Figures of the Jew” (Jewish Studies Quarterly27:2–3, 2020) and is working on a book-project titled “Reviving Judaism, Reviving the Nation: Post-Holocaust Imaginaries of the (German) Nation-State.” Her research interests include Talmud, halakha, and contemporary European Jewry. Her work draws on the critical study of secularism and current discussions related to the co-constitutive relations between Europe, the European subject, and Europe’s racial-religious others.
