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Israel’s Moment: Support for and Opposition to the Founding of the Jewish State – A Conversation with Jeffrey Herf

April 4, 2022 at 4:00 pm

Monday, April 4, 2022

4:00 p.m.

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The State of Israel was established in 1947–1948 when the governments of the United States, the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc, and two-thirds of the United Nations General Assembly endorsed the Zionist project. In the U.S., support for the cause of the Jewish state came from liberals and left-liberals who, like Socialists, Communists and Gaullist veterans of the Resistance in France, viewed the Zionist project as at one with the anti-fascist and anti-colonial sentiments. Opposition to establishing a Jewish state in Palestine — beyond the Arab League and the Arab Higher Committee in Palestine — came from diplomatic and military leaders in the United States and Britain. They viewed the Jewish state as a threat to the emerging policy of Cold War communist containment, a hindrance to accessing oil in the Middle East, and as a geopolitical benefit to the Soviet Union.

Join us for a conversation with historian Jeffrey Herf (University of Maryland), whose new book, Israel’s Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945–1949, reevaluates the global history of Israeli independence.

Sponsored by the Norman and Irma Braman Chair in Holocaust Studies

Featured Speaker:

Jeffrey Herf is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. He studies the intersection of ideas and politics in Modern European history. He has published numerous award-winning books, including Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (1984), Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (1997), The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (2006), Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (2009), and Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left (2016).
 

Details

Date:
April 4, 2022
Time:
4:00 pm
Website:
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Venue

Virtual