The War in Gaza and the International Context

Bernard Avishai and Noam Pianko–two leading scholars on Zionist thought and US-Israeli relations–will sit down with Professor Galen Jackson to discuss a number of key issues related to the ongoing war in Gaza. Specifically, they will talk about how the October 7 Hamas attack has impacted the American Jewish community, become a point of political tension in the United States and a core issue in American politics, competing understandings of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the potential for a shift in the nature of US-Israeli relations, changing political dynamics within Israel, how Israelis and American Jews view past efforts at negotiations with the Palestinians, and what the legacy of October 7 is likely to be in Israel.

This is the first of three roundtable discussions on the background to the war in Gaza and the international context.  This public conversation will be moderated by Associate Professor Galen Jackson of the Political Science Department.  

Noam Pianko is the Samuel N. Stroum Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Jackson School of International Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies/Judaic Studies from Yale University in 2004 and joined the Jackson School faculty in the fall of that year. Pianko’s research interests include modern Jewish history, Zionism, and American Judaism. His first book, “Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz Kaplan, Kohn” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010) uncovers the thought of three key interwar Jewish intellectuals who defined Zionism’s central mission as challenging the model of a sovereign nation-state.His second book, “Jewish Peoplehood: An American Innovation” (Rutgers University Press, 2015), won the American Jewish Historical Society’s Saul Viener Book prize.  The book traces the history of an idea that is deceptively straightforward and enduring. The concept of “peoplehood” emerged at the beginning of the last century as an American-Jewish innovation calibrated to shape discussions of nationalism, Zionism, and American Jewish identity. Peoplehood’s successful integration of a nationalist paradigm into the American context created a powerful vocabulary for negotiating American Jewish identity in response to dramatic historical events of the twentieth century, such as the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel.

Bernard Avishai is a Visiting Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and Adjunct Professor of Business at the Hebrew University. He received his Ph.D., in Political Economy from the University of Toronto in 1978. A Guggenheim fellow, he is the author of ‘The Tragedy of Zionism,’ ‘A New Israel,’ ‘The Hebrew Republic,’ and ‘Promiscuous: Portnoy’s Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness.’ He contributes regularly on political economy and Israeli affairs to the New Yorker; and has written dozens of articles for Harper’s, The New York Review, The Nation and New York Times Magazine. He is a former editor of Harvard Business Review, and International Director of Intellectual Capital at KPMG. He has been co-teaching a course at Dartmouth the past two years called “The Politics of Israel and Palestine” with Ezzedine Fishere, a former Egyptian diplomat who served under the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process. Their “work in the class—a civil, exploratory dialogue sustained over eighteen sessions—anchored a series of public forums at the college in the aftermath of the horrors of October 7th.” ~The New Yorker

Galen Jackson ’09 received his Ph.D. in from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2016. Jackson teaches courses in international relations, international security, American foreign policy, nuclear weapons, cybersecurity, the international relations of the Middle East, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. He has published articles on the Arab-Israeli dispute in a number of scholarly journals, including International Security, Security Studies, the Journal of Cold War Studies, Middle East Journal, and Diplomacy & Statecraft. He is the author of A Lost Peace Great Power Politics and the Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1967–1979 (Cornell University Press, 2023) and editor of The 1973 Arab-Israeli War (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2023).

Roundtable Two: Leila Farsakh, Ilana Feldman, and Dana El-Kurd on April 18. Bronfman Auditorium @ 4:30 p.m.

Roundtable Three: Stephen Walt and and Aaron David Miller on April 25. MainStage, ’62 Center @ 7:00 p.m.

These events are sponsored be the Class of ’71 Public Affairs Forum, the Cohan Family Forum Fund, and the Lecture Committee.

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