Conference Program

Wednesday, April 30

4:00–4:15        Welcome and Opening Remarks   

Maurice Samuels (Yale University) 

4:15–6:30        Panel 1:  From the Enlightenment to 1848 and Beyond

Chair:  Isaac Nakhimovsky (Yale University) 

               David Bell (Princeton University) 

                           Jews in the French Enlightenment Imagination

           Antoine Lilti (Collège de France)  

            Was Voltaire an anti-Semite? The Enlightenment on Trial

               Helena Rosenblatt (CUNY) 

                           Freedom of Religion and the First Liberals: Madame de Staël and
                          Benjamin
Constant on Judaism

          David Sorkin (Yale University) 

                           The Invention of Emancipation Politics

               Paul Hanebrink (Rutgers University) 

                           Jews, Liberalism, and the Long Shadow of “Judeo-Bolshevism”: The case of 
                           Hungary

Thursday, May 1

9:00–10:45      Panel 2:  Theorists of Liberalism and the “Jewish Question”
 

Chair:  Seyla Benhabib (Yale University) 

           Steven Smith (Yale University) 

                           Spinoza’s Jewish Question:  His or Ours?

               Ronnie Grinberg (University of Oklahoma) 

                           The New York Intellectuals, Gender, and Liberalism in the Age of McCarthy

               Rebecca Kobrin (Columbia University) 

                           Columbia University, Antisemitism and the Making of Lionel Trilling’s
                          
The Liberal Imagination 

               Malachi Hacohen (Duke University) 

             Jewish History and the End of the Liberal Era         

11:00–12:45    Panel 3:  American Liberals and Zionism

Chair:  Eliyahu Stern (Yale University) 

Noah Feldman (Harvard University) 

Between Idealism and Idealization: American Liberal Zionism from Brandeis to the Present Crisis

                  Joshua Leifer (Yale University) 

                           The Making and Unmaking of American Liberal Zionism

                  Susie Linfield (New York University) 

                           Zionism and Antizionism: The End of Liberalism?

2:00–3:45        Panel 4:  Is Illiberalism Bad for the Jews?

Chair:  Yair Listokin (Yale University) 

Franklin Foer (The Atlantic) 

              Was American Jewish Liberalism a God That Failed?

                  James Loeffler (Johns Hopkins University) 

                           Fearless Speech: On the Possibility of Jewish Liberalism

             Elisabeth Zerofsky (New York Times) 

                          Is the New European Far Right Philosemitic?

4:00–5:30        Panel 5:  Roundtable

Chair:  Samuel Moyn (Yale University) 

Zack Beauchamp (Vox)
M. Gessen (New York Times)
Michelle Goldberg (New York Times)  
Adam Gopnik (The New Yorker)