Reckoning with October 7: Historians on Ideology and Politics in the 1948 War

"Historians on Ideology and Politics in the 1948 War: October 7 and the Aftershocks of World War II" is the second webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute's yearlong series reckoning with the response to the atrocities on October 7. This panel features Jeffrey Herf, Matthias Küntzel, and Benny Morris, and it was moderated by Gabriel Noah Brahm. The discussion took place on February 7, 2024.

Jeffrey Herf, Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus, University of Maryland, College Park, is author of Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale 2009), Israel's Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State (Cambridge 2022), and Three Face of Antisemitism: Right, Left and Islamist (Routledge 2024).

Matthias Küntzel, author of Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (Telos 2009) and Nazism, Islamic Antisemitism, and the Middle East: The 1948 Arab War Against Israel and the Aftershocks of World War II, is a political scientist and historian based in Hamburg, Germany.

Benny Morris, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, has transformed understandings of the modern Middle East with his books The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge 1988), 1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War (Yale 2008), and The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924, co-authored with Dror Ze'evi (Harvard 2019).

Topics: Webinars • Israel Initiative