KEYNOTE SPEAKER: DR. SUSANNAH HESCHEL

FOLLOWED BY WORKSHOPS

Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and chair of the Jewish Studies Program and a faculty member of the Religion Department.

Prof. Heschel and her Dartmouth colleagues from Israel, Lebanon, and Egypt, have been widely commended for their swift and academically rigorous response to the Israel-Gaza crisis that exploded on October 7, 2023. The forums they led, on October 9 and 12, while other campuses were in turmoil, drew huge audiences of students and members of the general public who wanted to understand what was happening. “We have friendship, and we have trust,” Dr. Heschel said of the panel of experts, “and when this happened, we knew we had to do something.”

Breakout Session:

Yoga- Laurie Greenberg

Creating Art as a Process of Exploration and Discovery- Kathy Parsonnet

Dialogue Circle - what is the intersection between growing resilience regarding antisemitism and collective trauma?- Pam Steiner

Israeli Dancing- Diane Roston

Healing Circle- Gene Kadish

The Poetry of Resilience and Resistance “in the midst of life” —in the Face of Antisemitism - Doris Ferlerger & Beth Kanell

Equanimity through Chant - Peggy Kasden & Shari Borzekowski

Community Interfaith Dialogue- Rev. Amy Spagna, Rev. Leon Dunkley, Rev. Jonathan Hauze,

Symposium Sponsored By :

Shir Shalom VT & Upper Valley Jewish Community/Kol Ha'Emek Learning will be as part of our combined responsibility under the auspices of the Memorial Scrolls Trust, The Gravitz Family Shir Shalom VT and the Roth Center.

With support from JCVT and Harold Grinspoon Foundation.

What rights do people have to criticize their country? Other countries? When do those criticisms become hateful? And when they become hateful, how should they be combatted? This talk discusses how these questions relate to contemporary anti-Zionism and antisemitism. His discussion draws upon three relevant documents: The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “Working Definition of Antisemitism” (2016); The Nexus Document: Understanding Antisemitism and its Nexus with Israel and Zionism (2021); and The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021).

Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History at Harvard University and Director of Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies. He is also a resident faculty member at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) and is affiliated with Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Penslar takes a comparative and transnational approach to modern Jewish history, which he studies within the contexts of modern nationalism, capitalism, and colonialism. His books have engaged with a variety of approaches and methods, including the history of science and technology (Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of the Jewish Settlement in Palestine 1870-1918, 1991), economic history (Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe, 2001), military history (Jews and the Military: A History, 2013), biography (Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader, 2020), and the history of emotions (Zionism: An Emotional State, 2023). In two co-edited volumes, Penslar has brought Jewish studies into conversation with postcolonial studies (Orientalism and the Jews, 2005) and Unacknowledged Kinships: Postcolonial Theory and the Historiography of Zionism, 2023). His current interests lie in international history, and he is writing a book about worldwide reactions to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

Sponsored by the Raul Hilberg Distinguished Professorship of Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont