Responses To October 7th

Panel Discussion Part of the program series The Origins and Ideology of Hamas Admission: Free Watch the video

Historian Jeffrey Herf will lead a panel exploring responses to Hamas’ October 7th massacres and to the state of Israel’s subsequent military response. Meir Litvak will discuss his scholarship on the Islamization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; Norman Goda will examine rules of war, civilian casualties, and accusations of genocide; Karin Stögner will discuss theories of race and intersectionality and anti-Zionism, and the gendered aspects of the violence of October 7; and David Hirsh will examine the nature of leftist anti-Zionism that achieved predominance for some years in the British Labor Party.

Read David Hirsh and Hilary Miller’s article, “Durban Antizionism: Its Sources, Its Impact, and Its Relation to Older Anti-Jewish Ideologies” in Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism.

Read David Hirsh’s article, “What is anti-Zionism and how does it relate to antisemitism?” from Antisemitic Anti-Zionism: The Origins and Character of an Ideology.

Read Meir Litvak’s article, “’Martyrdom is Life’: Jihad and Martyrdom in the Ideology of Hamas” from Studies in Conflict & Terrorism.

Read Karin Stögner’s article, “Antisemitism and Intersectional Feminism: Strange Alliances.”

Read Karin Stögner’s article, “Intersectionality and Antisemitism: A New Approach.”

Read Norman Goda's article, “South African Lawfare at The Hague.”

View the series bibliography.

Buy the books from this series.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

About the Speakers

Jeffrey Herf studies the intersection of ideas and politics in modern European history, specializing in twentieth century Germany. He has published extensively on Germany during the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and on West and East Germany during the Cold War. His research interests now focus on the Nazi period and German and European history in post World War II decades up to the collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War in 1989.

Meir Litvak is a Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern History and a senior research associate at the Alliance Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University. His major field of research is the linkage between religion, society, and politics in modern Iranian Shi`ism and the linkage between nationalism and religion in the Muslim Middle East. Litvak has also researched antisemitism in Iran and in the Arab world, particularly attitudes towards the Holocaust and has written on the ideology of the Palestinian Hamas movement.

Norman Goda is the Norman and Irma Braman Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He studies modern European history and specializes in the history of the Holocaust, war crimes trials, and twentieth century diplomacy. He teaches courses on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany from historical and interdisciplinary perspectives. He is the author of Tomorrow the World: Hitler, Northwest Africa, and the Path toward America (1998); Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War (2007); The Holocaust: Europe, the World, and the Jews (2013). Goda has served as a consultant to the US and German governments, as well as for various radio, television, and film documentaries in the US, Europe, and Israel.

Karin Stögner is Professor of Sociology at the University of Passau. She received both her PhD and her Habilitation from the University of Vienna. Previously she did research and teaching at various universities, e.g. Goethe University Frankfurt, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Justus Liebig-University Gießen, University of Vienna, Lancaster University, Georgetown University and Central European University. Her research focuses on Critical Theory and feminist theory, on antisemitism, racism, nationalism, and sexism as well as on National Socialism and the post-national-socialist societies. She was coordinator of Research Network 31: Racism and Antisemitism until 2023.

David Hirsh has been in the sociology department at Goldsmiths, University of London since 2003. Hirsh has written Law Against Genocide: Cosmopolitan Trials, which focuses on two trials from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the trial of Andrei Sawoniuk for crimes committed during the Holocaust, and the David Irving libel case, coming to some tentative conclusions about the possibility of the emergence of cosmopolitan law. He is also the author of Contemporary Left Antisemitism, which examines case studies of openly antisemitic discourse which have emerged out of anti-Zionism, and it thinks about specifically sociological approaches to understanding contemporary antisemitism.