Jewish Studies Program, JSO, Littauer Foundation, The "It's Complicated" project of the Hannah Arendt Center Presents

Times A-Changin'

Formed in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the settled-upon pillars of American Jewish self-definition (Americanism, Zionism, and liberalism) have begun to collapse. The binding trauma of Holocaust memory grows ever-more attenuated; soon there will be no living survivors. After two millennia of Jewish life defined by diasporic existence, the majority of the world’s Jews will live in a sovereign Jewish state by 2050. Against the backdrop of national political crises, resurgent global antisemitism, and the horrors of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, American Jewish identity is undergoing epochal change. Where might things go from here?

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Joshua Leifer is a journalist whose essays and reporting have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Haaretz, The Nation, and elsewhere. A member of the Dissent editorial board, he previously worked as an editor at Jewish Currents and at +972 Magazine. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Yale University, where he studies the history of modern moral and social thought. His first book Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life (Dutton 2024) won a National Jewish Book Award in 2025.

For more information, call 845-758-7662, or e-mail ssecunda@bard.edu.

Time: 5:15 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102

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