The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA) was closed on July 31, 2011. This website is an archive of the official website upon its closure and is strictly for research archival purposes.
The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism
Newsletter
Volume 3 No. 1
12 September 2008
A LETTER FROM DIRECTOR CHARLES SMALL
Dear YIISA Community,
I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you to the new 2008-2009 academic year at the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA). I hope that you had an enjoyable summer, and that you will attend, or follow on-line, our many planned activies.
I am extraordinarily pleased to announce that YIISA now has six post doctorate researchers, two graduate fellows and one senior visiting professor, housed at our research center. Each of these leading scholars brings much experience and enthusiasm, and are among the first group of scholars to be housed at YIISA. The post doctorate researchers are Dr. Clemens Heni, Dr. Joshua Kaplan, Dr. Andre Oboler, Dr. Anat Plocker, Dr. Annette Seidel-Arpaci, and Dr. Idit Shalev. YIISA’s graduate fellows are Benjamin Herzog of Yale University and Cosmina Paul of Babes-Bolyai University, Romania. YIISA will also be joined by Senior Visiting Professor, Dr. Bassam Tibi from Göttingen University, Germany. Their biographies are included below.
Recently, YIISA published a second paper of the Working Paper Series entitled; This Green and Pleasant Land: Britain and the Jews, by Shalom Lappin, King’s College, London. The paper is available online at www.yale.edu/yiisa/workingpaper. Hard copies are also available upon request. Please email yiisa.programs@yale.edu for details or requests.
Beginning Thursday, September 25th, YIISA’s Antisemitism in Comparative Perspective Seminar Series will resume. Lectures will occur on Thursdays from 4:15pm – 6:00pm. Some of the speakers include Richard Landes, Melanie Phillips, Paul Iganski, Robert Wistrich, Yossi Klein Halevi, Jeffry Herf, Esther Webman and other leading international scholars. The full schedule will be posted shortly online at www.yale.edu/yiisa/seminars.
I am very pleased YIISA has expanded into a “real” research center, comprising high caliber scholars, faculty and staff. I hope that you will join us at our seminars, events, and to meet and welcome the YIISA scholars.
All the best for the New Year,
Charles Small
____________________________________
Charles Asher Small (D.Phil)
Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism
Institution for Social and Policy Studies
Yale University
77 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT., 06520
United States
Office Telephone – 203 436 8189
www.yale.edu/yiisa
BIOGRAPHIES
Post Doctorate Associates:
Clemens Heni, PhD studied Cultural Studies, Philosophy, History and Political Science at the Universities of Tuebingen (with a German equivalent to BA), Bremen (with a diploma/MA in Political Science), and Free University Berlin. He finished his studies at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) with his doctoral dissertation (PhD) in Political Science with a work on New Right, antisemitism and anti-Americanism in the political culture of Germany from 1970 until 2005, including chapters on National Socialism. The dissertation was published (509 pages) 2007 in German. Clemens received several Fellowships from the German Hans-Boeckler-Foundation, the fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in France and he was a Felix Posen Fellow in 2003 and 2004 (Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem). Clemens did publish several articles on antisemitism, the Holocaust, German history and new antisemitism/political Islam/Jihad, including its Western friends. He was a founding member of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East/German chapter in November 2007.
Josh Kaplan is broadly trained across the social sciences. He has an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago and a DEA in international law from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. His research interests lie at the intersection of several topic areas: international law, nationalism and transnationalism, social and political movements, human rights, and antisemitism. He has received a number of grants and fellowships for his research, including: the Lady Davis Fellowship, the Gallatin Fellowship in international law, the National Science Foundation, the University of Chicago, and the Council for Advanced Studies in Peace and International Cooperation (CASPIC)/MacArthur Scholars. He has conducted field research in Israel/Palestine, Geneva and New York, among other locations.
Andre Oboler holds a PhD in Computer Science from Lancaster University (UK) and a first class honors degree in computer science from Monash University (Australia). He is currently a Post Doctoral Fellow in the Political Science Department at Bar-Ilan University (Israel) where his research has focused on online public diplomacy.
Dr Oboler has pioneered work in the study of online antisemitism, coining the phrase “Antisemitism 2.0″ and presenting on the topic to the Global Forum to Combat Antisemitism and in a key paper published by the JCPA. He has also conducted research in Facebook, Google Earth and Wikipedia. Research in other web 2.0 applications is on-going.
Anat Plocker obtained her BA and MA (magna cum laude) in history from Tel Aviv University. She wrote her dissertation in the department of history at Stanford University where she specialized in Modern Eastern European and Jewish history. The dissertation, entitled “’Zionists to Dayan’: the anti- Zionist campaign in Poland, 1967-1968,” is the first English-language study of the subject. The dissertation traces the development, causes, consequences and abrupt end of the campaign that led to the emigration of thousands of Jews from communist Poland. It maps the different voices in the communist Party, revealing the ideology behind the campaign and explaining this outburst of post-Holocaust anti-Semitism. During her studies, Ms. Plocker received the William J. and Fern E. Lowenberg Fellowship for Holocaust Studies and the James Birdsall Weter Memorial Fund fellowship.
Annette Seidel Arpacı (MA, PhD Leeds) has worked in the Dept of German, Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Leeds/UK. Prior to her studies in Britain, she trained in alternative medicine and psychotherapy, and studied art and design in Germany. She has worked in various fields, such as in feminist projects (Women’s helpline, Center for therapy of women and children) and has been engaged in migrant initiatives in Germany. Both in her research and for her teaching she is interested in the political and social legacy of National Socialism in Germany, Holocaust memory and ‘multiculturalism’, and the histories of racisms and anti-Semitism. She has been awarded several scholarships and fellowships and received her PhD in 2005 at the Centre for Jewish Studies at Leeds for her thesis entitled ‘Holocaust Memory, Migration and ‘Otherness’ in Renationalised Germany’.
She has co-authored a comparative study on Racisms in Feminist Psychosocial Support Networks in Germany, France and Britain (1999), has written about representations of Jewishness and Blackness in the Buffy/Angelverse (2003) and currently is the co-editor of a forthcoming volume entitled Trauma, Victims and Collective Memory: Discourses of German Wartime Suffering in Historical and International Perspective. Annette’s most recent publications are ‘National Memory’s Schlüsselkinder: Migration, Pedagogy, and German Remembrance Culture, in German Culture, Politics and Literature into the Twenty-First Century, eds. S. Taberner and P. Cooke (Camden House, 2006).
Dr. Idit Shalev received her BA in psychology and special education, Tel Aviv University, Israel; a MA in counseling psychology, Tel Aviv University, Israel; a PhD with distinction, in research of emotions, Haifa University, Israel; and a PhD with distinction, in clinical psychology, Haifa University, Israel. She worked as a therapist and in a supervisory capacity at the Child Study Center at Schneider Children’s hospital of Israel. She taught at Tel Aviv University, and at the Open University, Israel. Idit Shalev worked as a fellow in social psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Maryland; and in clinical psychology, Department of Psychiatry, University of Florida. Her research draws from both clinical and experimental social psychology perspectives, to understand the relations between motivational mechanisms and functioning, and to develop evidence based interventions accordingly. Her studies demonstrated the effect of chronic and contextual motivations on personality organization, emotional functioning, impulsivity-compulsivity symptoms, and adherence to the medical regimen. Her current interests are in (1) motivational aspects of Antisemitism (2) action and inaction in aggressor-victim relations; (3) interventions for reduction of racism and peer victimization.
Graduate Fellows:
Ben Herzog has a B.A. Sociology and Political Science (Tel Aviv University), M.A. Sociology, Distinction (Tel Aviv University), M.A. Sociology (Yale University), M.Phil. Sociology (Yale University). His areas of interest include Political Sociology, Citizenship, Historical Sociology, immigration, and refugees. He is doing researching a comparative study of the revocation of citizenship in Israel, Canada and the US for his doctorate dissertation.
Cosmina Paul is a PhD candidate in History at the Babes-Bolyai University, Romania. In addition to work on her dissertation, “Anti-Semitism in the Romanian Collective Imaginary in the 20th Century” she collaborated on research projects at the Institute of Oral History Cluj Napoca. She holds a BD in Sociology and an MA in Jewish Studies from Babes-Bolyai University. Ms. Paul’s research activities using oral history interviews, sociological inquiries and classic history analysis are centered on anti-Semitism, collective memory and Jewish heritage.
Visiting Professor:
Dr. Bassam Tibi is a Professor of International Relations in Goettingen parallel to his position as a non-resident A.D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University. Born in Damascus he was educated in Islamic and Western schools until he completed his high school education there with the French Baccalaureat. In 1962 he moved to Germany to study Social Science, Philosophy and History at the Wolfgang von Goethe University of Frankfurt where he received his first Ph.D. in 1971. Among his academic teachers (Frankfurt School) were Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Jürgen Habermas and Iring Fetscher. Professor Tibi received his Dr. habil. (German Super PhD) from the University of Hamburg.
Professor Tibi’s academic career began at the universities of Frankfurt and Heidelberg 1970 – 1973. Hereafter, Dr. Tibi was then appointed 1973 as Professor for International Relations at the University of Goettingen. In 1988 he was appointed Professor of Comparative Politics as successor of Stein Rokkan at the University of Bergen/Norway by a Royal resolution of King Olav IV. He established the Center of International Affairs of which Professor Tibi has been the Director ever since. At this center he established Islamology as a study of Islam and conflict in society and in international politics.