Lecture on ‘American Jews and Israel’

Dov Waxman

This year’s 2019 Rabbi Max B. Wall Lecture at Saint Michael’s College will be presented Dov Waxman, Stotsky Professor of Jewish Historical and Cultural Studies at Northeastern University and Professor of Political Science, International Affairs, and Israel Studies. The lecture will be at 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 14 in the Dion Family Student Center Roy Room. Professor Waxman’s topic will be “American Jews and Israel: The Dissolution of Consensus.”

In this presentation, Waxman will consider: How is the American Jewish relationship with Israel changing? Do American Jews still support Israel just as much as they once did? Are younger American Jews alienated from Israel? Dov Waxman will address these topical questions as he outlines the major trends and developments shaping the American Jewish relationship with Israel now and into the future. Waxman will argue that a major transformation is taking place in the American Jewish relationship with Israel—the age of unquestioning and uncritical American Jewish support for Israel is over, and a new era of American Jewish conflict over Israel is replacing the old era of solidarity.

Dov Waxman is the Stotsky Professor of Jewish Historical and Cultural Studies at Northeastern University and Professor of Political Science, International Affairs, and Israel Studies. He is also the director of the Middle East Studies program at Northeastern University and the co-director of its Middle East Center.

His research focuses on the Israel-Palestine conflict, Israeli politics and foreign policy, U.S.-Israel relations, American Jewry’s relationship with Israel, and Jewish politics. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University and his B.A. from Oxford University. He has previously taught at the City University of New York, Bowdoin College, and the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey; and he has been a visiting fellow at Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Oxford University.

He is the author of The Pursuit of Peace and the Crisis of Israeli Identity: Defending / Defining the Nation (Palgrave), Israel’s Palestinians: The Conflict Within (with Ilan Peleg, Cambridge University Press), and Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel (Princeton University Press). His new book, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs to Know, will be published by Oxford University Press in May 2019.

This event is open to the public and traditionally has a large turnout from the off-campus community.