Barbara Epstein is a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches on the history of social movements and theory relevant to social change. Her books include Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and the 1980s (Univ. of California Press) and The Minsk Ghetto, 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism (Univ. of California Press). Between the 1970s and 1990s, Prof....

Moishe Postone is a professor of History at the University of Chicago. He is author of Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge Univ. Press), History and Heteronomy (The University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy), and co-editor (with Eric Santner) of Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century (Univ. of Chicago Press), among many other books and articles.

Mitchell Cohen is a professor of Political Science at Baruch College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. His books include Zion and State: Nation, Class, and the Shaping of Modern Israel (Columbia Univ. Press), The Wager of Lucien Goldmann: Tragedy, Dialectics, and the Hidden God (Princeton Univ. Press), and as co-editor, Princeton Readings in Political Thought (Princeton Univ. Press). In addition to scholarly journals, Prof. Cohen as written for The New York Times...

In recent decades, sympathy toward Israel among Leftists in Europe and the United States has given way to hostility. Perceived in its early years as a vital experiment in socialist democracy, Israel is now typically viewed by radicals and even many progressives as a colonialist power. What explains this shift in opinion? Does it reflect larger changes in the politics of the Left or, rather, changes in Israel? Does hostility toward Israel and Zionism have ramifications beyond the Left...

During the nineteenth century the majority of masskilim (Jewish intellectuals) in Germany appreciated only the “enlightened” aspects of Jewish religion. Mysticism was for them an obscure, retarded deviation from Judaism. When, where, how, and why did the rehabilitation of Jewish mysticism take place? This lecture will try to answer these questions. It will show that research of Jewish mysticism did not begin with Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, and it was not connected with Zionism. A...

Jay Michaelson argues that the “God vs. gay” divide is a pernicious myth and that religious people should favor gay rights because of religion, not despite it. As both a gay rights activist and religion scholar, Michaelson is uniquely positioned to tackle the contentious “God vs. Gay” divide. The author underscores that the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament both emphasize the importance of love, compassion, and equality. From this starting point, Michaelson offers a progressive take on gay...

At the turn of the twentieth century, over forty percent of the world’s Jews lived within the Russian Empire, almost all in the Pale of Settlement. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, the Jews of the Pale created a distinctive way of life little known beyond its borders, leading historian Simon Dubnow to label the territory a Jewish “Dark Continent.” Just before World War I, the author, revolutionary, and ethnographer known as An-sky led an ethnographic expedition into the Pale, producing an...

On December 17, 1862, as the Civil War entered its second winter, General Ulysses S. Grant issued General Orders #11, expelling “Jews as a class” from his war zone. It remains the most notorious anti-Jewish official order in American history. The order came back to haunt Grant in 1868 when he ran for president. Never before had Jews been so widely noticed in a presidential contest, and never before had they been confronted so publicly with the question of how to balance their “American” and...