In the last decades of the 20th century, Europe’s leaders and societies
turned Holocaust commemoration and education, the support of renewed Jewish
life across the continent, as well as the cultural and historical legacy of
Jewish life in the centuries ‘before’, into national priorities - as the
ultimate proof of each countries’ pluralist commitment to the future.
 
At present, however, Jews, their communities, and all those interested in
Jewish life and culture must adapt to a new ‘asemitic’ epoch, best defined
as being neither ‘philosemitic’ nor ‘antisemitic’, but one which takes Jews
for granted as one group competing among others for attention, subsidies,
and expression in our increasingly variegated and pluralist societies.
 
How can Jewish communities, individual Jews, and non-Jews involved in
‘things Jewish’ adapt to this new setting? This lecture will present a
typology of different Jewish-related ‘identity boxes’ to explain the
interaction between Jewish and non-Jewish ‘voices’ in our pluralist spaces.
Understanding ‘where’ one speaks from will enable Jews as well as non-Jews
to better define each other’s legitimacy in the continuum of private and
public spaces which define both the state and civil society.
 
Dr Diana Pinto is an intellectual historian and policy analyst living in
Paris. In the Spring term of 2009, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Center
for European Studies, Harvard University, from which she also obtained her
Ph.D in History. She has just completed a Ford Foundation sponsored project
which she conceived and directed, called “Voices for the Res Publica” ,
housed inside the Institute for Jewish Policy Research of London. The
project sought to develop new bases of common belonging for Europe’s
various religious and ethnic majorities and minorities, by respecting
different identities while also transcending them. This project combined Dr
Pinto’s longstanding interest in European postwar development (through her
work for the Council of Europe) with her reflections on the rebirth of
Jewish life in post-1989 Europe, a topic on which she has published
extensively in the last decade.

All warmly welcome to the refreshments at 18:30 and the seminar afterwards.

For further information, please contact Dr Andrea Schatz
(andrea.schatz@kcl.ac.uk) or Steffan Mathias (steffan.mathias@kcl.ac.uk)

By: Diana Franklin
Last updated: Tuesday, 16 November 2010