February 15-18, 2007
Convened by Professor Susannah Heschel
Judaism and Islam are religions with long histories of migrations and conquest, though very different traditions regarding ethnicity and diaspora. Public attention to the politically-fraught migrations of Muslims to Europe and the United States, and evaluations of the ultimate disaster of Jewish efforts at integration into Europe, suggest that a conference on both Jewish and Muslim experience would be worthwhile. Recently interest has grown on the part of scholars and journalists in migrations and their impact on Jewish and Muslim identities, as affected politically, culturally, religiously, and in terms of gender and sexuality. Both the rise of European anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the and the post-war rise of tensions over the Muslim presence in Europe and Turkey's membership in the European Union have raised questions about the nature of European nationalism and the modernity so proudly hailed for the past two hundred years. Contrasts between Europe and the United States have been drawn sharply over the question of Jews, Muslims and multiculturalism, yet efforts to uphold American society as a pinnacle of tolerance and as an environment in which difference is extolled and flourishes are being challenged by the Iraq war and by growing awareness of the economic and social consequences of globalization. Meanwhile, the shifts in defining Judaism and Islam as a result of the transnational migrations of the modern era have rarely been examined in comparative context, and only rarely have Judeophobia and Islamophobia been studied together. This conference will begin that comparative effort and intends to foster a discussion that will consider ways in which methodologies and interpretive frameworks might be shared as well as jointly called into question by the work of scholars in both Jewish and Islamic Studies.
This conference is the fourth in a series funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation to Professor Susannah Heschel as part of an effort to foster closer relations between scholars in the fields of Islamic Studies and Jewish Studies. Previous conferences, held at Dartmouth over the course of the past two years, have addressed topics of "Gendered Intersections: Feminist Scholarship in Islamic and Judaic Studies," "Orientalism and Fundamentalism in Jewish and Islamic Critique: A Conference Honoring Sadik al-Azm," and "Ink and Blood: Textuality and the Human in Judaism, Christianity and Islam."
This conference will convene scholars from Europe, the Middle East, the United States, and Canada, with an interest in Islamic and Jewish Studies and who work in a range of disciplines, including literature, anthropology, religion, linguistics, history, and political thought.
All sessions are open to the public.
Moderator: Veronika Fuechtner, Department of German Studies, Dartmouth College
Moderator: Gene Garthwaite, Department of History, Dartmouth College
Moderator: Michael Ermarth, Department of History, Dartmouth College
Moderator: Ed Miller, Department of History, Dartmouth College
Moderator: Gene Garthwaite, Department of History, Dartmouth College
Moderator: Amy Allen, Department of Philosophy, Dartmouth College
Co-Sponsors Include: Office of the Provost, The Fannie and Alan Leslie Center for the Humanities, German Studies Department, The William P. and Dewilda N. Harris German/Dartmouth Distinguished Visiting Professorship, The John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, Jewish Studies Program
