We are living in a turbulent and ominous hour. The volatility of politics in the United States and Europe, the rise of authoritarian ideologies and governments, the ferocity of the debates about immigration and difference, the new faces of anti-Semitism and xenophobia: these momentous and unsettling developments have enormous implications for Jews in the West. How should American Jewry make sense of these changes? What are the dangers they pose to Jewish values and Jewish interests? Is anti-Semitism on the rise, and why? Is European Jewry in peril? How should Jews think about the liberal order and its increasingly powerful critics?
Bernard-Henri Lévy, Leon Wieseltier, Paul Berman, and Alana Newhouse will discuss these urgent and unsettling questions, and attempt to place them in their historical and intellectual contexts.
Co-presented with Tablet.