“Critical Theory and Zionism”

Dr. Clemens Heni
Director, The Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA)

Thursday, March 27, 2014
12:30 PM

ISGAP Offices
165 East 56th Street
(between Lexington and 3rd Avenue)
New York, NY 10022

The event is free and open to the public. All are encouraged to attend.

Attendees must RSVP by contacting the ISGAP Office.
Email: [email protected]
Phone: (212) 230-1840

ISGAP looks forward to your attendance at this special event.

About the Author

Dr. Clemens Heni, political scientist (PhD University of Innsbruck, Austria, 2006, “summa cum laude”), Felix Posen Fellow (Hebrew University, 2003(2004), Post-Doc at Yale (2008/09), currently director of The Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA). Dr. Heni is the author of Right Wing Extremism, the New Right and political culture in Germany 1970-2005 (2007, 509 pages, German), German antisemitism, the Holocaust and post-Holocaust secondary antisemitism (2009, 330 pages, German), Islamic Studies and Antisemitism in Germany after 9/11 (2011, 410 pages, German), his first book in English Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon. Holocaust Trivializaion – Islamism – Post-colonial and Cosmopolitan anti-Zionism (2013, 648 pages), and his latest book Is Critical Theory pro-Israel? (forthcoming, in German, 2014)

In his talk, the author will show the relationship of critical theory towards Zionism and the Jewish state of Israel. Based on mostly German sources he analyzes the writings on Zionism by the founder of critical theory in 1937, Max Horkheimer, and his fellow theorists like Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Leo Loewenthal. What would Adorno have said about Judith Butler being awarded the Adorno Prize in 2012? What is the relationship of New York City to German-Jewish intellectuals and their take on Israel? Why did the leading scholar of the Frankfurt School promote Butler in New York City? Was critical theory anti-Israel? Or has critical theory become anti-Zionist? If so, why? This talk will provide you with answers on some the most troubling questions in regard of critical theory, one of the leading schools in philosophy of the 20th century.