Why We Argue about Antisemitism Today

This event will be rescheduled for the Fall.

Join us for the inaugural lecture in the USC Shoah Foundation’s Antisemitism Lecture Series by Dr. Dov Waxman, who will present on why we argue about antisemitism today. Antisemitism has become a contentious issue in recent years. At a time when antisemitism is resurgent, arguments about it are increasingly common. This talk will discuss why the issue of antisemitism has become so contentious. The reason is not only because people strongly disagree about what is antisemitic when it comes to the highly charged Israeli-Palestinian issue, but also because there is no longer a shared understanding of what antisemitism is. Consequently, charges of antisemitism are hotly disputed nowadays, often accompanied by accusations of bad faith.

Dov Waxman is the Professor of Political Science, the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Chair in Israel Studies, and the director of the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Waxman's research focuses on the conflict over Israel-Palestine, Israeli politics and foreign policy, U.S.-Israel relations, American Jewry’s relationship with Israel, Jewish politics, and anti-Semitism. He is the author of dozens of scholarly articles and four books: The Pursuit of Peace and The Crisis of Israeli Identity: Defending / Defining the Nation (Palgrave, 2006), Israel’s Palestinians: The Conflict Within (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel (Princeton University Press, 2016), and most recently, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2019). He has also been published in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Atlantic Monthly, Salon, Foreign Policy, The Forward, and Ha’aretz, and he is a frequent commentator on television and radio.