Lecture: Religious Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was born out of competing nationalisms in the same land, and to a large extent it remains a struggle over land and rights. However, the events of 1967 and 1979 in the Middle East catalyzed the latent forces of religious nationalism, further complicating the unresolved conflict between two peoples in the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Ross Brann is the Milton R. Konvitz Professor of Judeo-Islamic Studies and the Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University. He is the author of The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), recipient of the National Jewish Book Award for Sefardic Studies; and of Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Muslims and Jews in Islamic Spain (Princeton University Press, 2002).

Brann has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, and he was elected as a Fellow by the American Academy for Jewish Research. Brann is also the editor of four volumes and author of many essays on the intersection of Jewish and Islamic culture. He is currently completing his newest publication, Andalusi Moorings: Al-Andalus and Sefarad as Cultural Tropes (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).

This is a joint event hosted by the Department of History, the Jewish Studies program, and the Middle East Studies program.

For more information, contact Magda Teter, Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at 347-364-3472 or jewishstudies@fordham.edu.

For additional information, please visit fordham.edu/jewishstudies.