Gary A. Rendsburg
The Alan Crown Lecture
The First Diasporas: Egypt and Babylonia

With the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E., Jews left the land of Israel in large numbers. Over the course of the next two centuries, we find a considerable amount of archaeological evidence for Jewish life both in Egypt and in Babylonia. The former includes most remarkably the outpost of Jewish soldiers and families at Elephantine, in the far south of Egypt, opposite Aswan. The latter includes hundreds of cuneiform tablets attesting to Jewish businesses and mercantile interests. These people clearly took Jeremiah’s charge (29:1-7) to heart and successfully reconstructed their lives in exile.

The Alan Crown Lecture 2019

Colin Shindler
The Balfour Declaration Revisited

Did Lloyd-George’s government issue the Balfour Declaration in November 1917 out of the goodness of its collective heart?
In addition to British national interests in a time of war, did genteel anti-Semitism and ‘the perceived power of international Jewry’ play a central role?
Was it an ‘historic error’ which led to a century of conflict between Zionist Jews and Palestinian Arabs?

Colin Shindler
A Pariah amongst Nations? A History of Israel and the Left

Despite virtually unanimous support in 1948, what has led to the acerbic criticism of Israel – as a state rather than its government’s policies – by the international Left in 2018?
Is there a difference between a national Left of a country and its Jewish Left? Is ideological anti-Zionism more important than a legitimate support of the Palestinian cause?
Has the question of Israel become symbolic of the struggle between Right and Left in a country – regardless of the complex realities of the Israel-Palestine imbroglio?

The Rise of the Israel Right: From Menachem Begin to Bibi Netanyahu

Why has the Right become the incumbent party of government in Israel?
How did Menahem Begin transform his Herut movement, winning only 14 seats out 120 in 1949 to winning power as the Likud in 1977?
Why has the far Right, opposed to the Likud, emerged as a political force to be reckoned with?
Despite all the cynicism directed at Netanyahu, amidst charges of corruption that may land him in court, why is the current prime minister, according to opinion polls, heading towards yet another Likud electoral victory?

Carole Fink on International History & Jewish History

Disparate partners linked by the tragic German-Jewish past, the Federal Republic of Germany and the State of Israel began a diplomatic relationship in 1965 that was colored by a changing Cold War and their clashing national goals and domestic politics.

Carole Fink on International History & Jewish History

World War I represented a major challenge to the Jewish people, during which they faced each other as enemies, underwent physical suffering and revolutions, and played their first role as diplomats at the Paris Peace Conference.

Carole Fink on International History & Jewish History

A reconsideration of two extraordinary Jewish women, who championed the rights of the oppressed and fought for social justice. Both were brilliant writers and remarkable speakers, and both insisted that humanity was best served by unremitting attention to personal freedom and democratic values.

At the end of the 1930s, women persecuted under a variety of European regimes came to France in order to find asylum. Some of them met in Rieucros, a French internment camp originally set up by the Third Republic. On the basis of emergency decrees of May and November 1938, the French state had established this first internment camp Rieucros in January 1939, which became a camp exclusively for women in October 1939. In February 1942, authorities transferred the entire camp population of women and children to the camp of Brens, near Albi in the South-West of France. After the transfer the situation became more and more dangerous for the Jewish prisoners as French Government more and more actively collaborated in the “final solution” On 26th August 1942 a great number of Jewish women were deported from Brens to Auschwitz where they all were killed. Anticipating this danger few women tried to escape and some of them who succeeded joined the French resistance.

While the geographical and social backgrounds of these women were extremely different, they had some points in common which provide a fascinating study. Many of the women produced autobiographical texts, which reflect their perceptions, visions and interpretations of their experiences of migration and imprisonment. These testimonies, together with numerous drawings, photos and a great number of interviews can be considered as a large archive of this specific historical event. The aim of this lecture is to give a deeper insight to this complex but long-time neglected chapter of women’s emigration to France focussing especially on the fate of Jewish women.

2009 marked a milestone in the history of the community of the North-African Jews in North America. A community that did not exist as such in 1958 – the Francophone Sephardim of Montreal – are now counted in the thousands, one out of ten Jews in Montreal was born in North Africa. After fifty years, Sephardic settlement in North-America needs to be understood as both a component of a French Canadian society in dynamic transition as well as another instance of a Jewish diaspora in the making. After half a century’s community life in Québec, essentially in Montréal, Sephardic identity merits full recognition as a North America reality. There are different elements framing the attitude of Moroccan Sephardim in Québec vis-à-vis their land of birth. On the one hand there is bitterness and resentment that they were “forced” to leave their homeland. But fifty years after the going in exile, a more rose-tinted nostalgia overshadowed the negative memories of Morocco. Memory of a laid back Mediterranean lifestyle balances the annual shock of the Québécois winter. There is little regret about the decision to emigrate, but a fondness for what was left behind, particularly in terms of personal relations and youthful dreams, drapes le Maroc with an aura of wistfulness. This lecture will look at the specific way this memory and “Moroccan Jewish identity” were inscribed in literary texts from North-African Jews exiled to Québec.

Two weeks before the first round of the French presidential elections, far-right candidate Marine le Pen denied France’s culpability in a roundup of Jews in Paris during World War II. By rejecting France’s responsibility for the Vél d’Hiv roundup, Le Pen hoped to boost her support. But her action stood in contrast to her strategy of ridding the right-wing party from its antisemitic image. Whether the National Front’s poor showing relative to initial predictions in the election was linked to her change of strategy is not clear. But as France’s role in the Holocaust remains a highly sensitive topic, her comments earned widespread condemnation from her political opponents, historians and Jewish groups.
The ambivalence at the heart of French memory with regard to the Second World War reflects the complexities of the French experience. Defeat and liberation, collaboration and resistance, the suffering of victims and the pride of heroes all mix together to form a web of ideas and emotions regarding the war and its legacy. This lecture will focus on monuments as prototypes of these cultural memories. The debate preceding the erection of a monument provides significant insight into the political and mental transformations of a society and its vision of the past. It will show how the transformation of memory from 1944 until the present is reflected in the monuments’ construction and analyse the debates that accompanied their development.