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: 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?

2:00–3:45

Panel 4: 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?

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)