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Israel's Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945–1949
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Book Talk
Admission: Free Note: This program was previously scheduled on April 6, 2022.
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Drawing on new research in government, public and private archives, Jeffrey Herf's Israel's Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945–1949 explores the political realities that underpinned support for and opposition to Zionist aspirations in Palestine in the wake of the Holocaust and during the onset of the Cold War. Herf explores the role of the United States, the Arab States, the Palestine Arabs, the Zionists, and key European governments from Britain and France to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Poland. His findings reveal a spectrum of support and opposition that stood in sharp contrast to the political coordinates that emerged during the Cold War, shedding new light on how and why the state of Israel was established in 1948 and challenging conventional associations of left and right, imperialism and anti-imperialism, and racism and anti-racism. Join YIVO for a conversation about this new book with Jeffrey Herf and YIVO's Executive Director Jonathan Brent.
About the Speakers
Jeffrey Herf is a Distinguished University Professor of Modern European history at the University of Maryland. His publications include Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967-1989 (2016), Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (2009), and The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (2006). He is a member of the American Historical Association and the German Studies Association.
Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.