Wednesday, January 25th 7:00-8:30 pm, Zoom

(Meeting ID: 981 6184 1226 Passcode: Serling)

Ethan Katz is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of California-Berkeley, where he is also the Chair of the Chancellor’s Committee on Jewish Life and Campus Climate. Since the spring of 2019, he has been the co-founder and co-director of the Antisemitism Education Initiative at Berkeley (along with Rabbi Naftalin-Kelman). This effort brings together administrators, faculty, and leaders of the campus Jewish community to create a sustained program to combat antisemitism, and has been treated as a resource and model by colleagues on a number of other campuses. Katz is also currently the co-chair of a Task Force of the Association for Jewish Studies on Antisemitism and Academic Freedom.

As a scholar, Dr. Katz’s work has focused on the Jewish experience in modern Europe and the Middle East, especially in France and the Francophone world. Much of his scholarship examines Jewish belonging and exclusion, Jewish-Muslim relations, the Holocaust, Islamophobia, and colonialism and its legacies. His book The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard, 2015) received five prizes, including a National Jewish Book Award and two awards for the best book of the year in French history.

Avinoam J. Patt is the Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies and Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut. In Spring 2022, he created and facilitated a new one-credit pop-up course at the University of Connecticut, Why the Jews: Confronting Antisemitism, which reached over 1600 students in the first semester it was offered. He is the author of multiple books on Jewish responses to the Holocaust, including Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, May 2009); co-editor (with Michael Berkowitz) of a collected volume on Jewish Displaced Persons, titled We are Here: New Approaches to the Study of Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Wayne State University Press, 2010); and is a contributor to several projects at the USHMM including Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1938-1940 (USHMM/Alta Mira Press, September 2011). He recently completed a new book on the early postwar memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt, published by Wayne State UP in May 2021). Together with David Slucki and Gabriel Finder, he is co-editor of a new volume Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust (April 2020) and, with Laura Hilton, is co-editor of the new volume Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust (University of Wisconsin Press, July 2020)  In 2022-23, he will serve as Visiting Professor of Holocaust Studies at New York University.

David Schraub is an Assistant Professor of Law at Lewis & Clark Law School, where he teaches courses on constitutional law and anti-discrimination law. He previously taught at DePaul University, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Illinois. David has published extensively on the subjects of antisemitism and anti-discrimination more broadly in both academic and popular outlets, such as the California Law Review, the American Political Science Review, and the Association of Jewish Studies (AJS) Review, as well as The Atlantic, The Jewish Daily Forward, and Haaretz. He holds a B.A. from Carleton College, a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, and a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley. 

Dr. Schraub has organized the 2nd annual conference on “Law vs. Antisemitism” at the Lewis & Clark Law School.