Antisemitism in South Asia in Comparative Perspective | ISGAP Webinar Series | Feb - May 2021 Thursdays 9 AM EST (US & Canada)
Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), New York Webinar Series
Antisemitism in South Asia in Comparative Perspective
Convened by Dr. Navras J. Aafreedi, Research Fellow, ISGAP, New York, USA
Thursdays, February - May 2021
9 AM USA & Canada (EST) | 2 PM UK | 4 PM Israel | 7 PM Pakistan | 7:30 PM India | 8 PM Bangladesh
Individual registration required for each webinar.
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"Antisemitism and the Qur'an"
Professor Reuven Firestone, Regenstein Professor in Medieval Judaism and Islam, Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles; Affiliate Professor of Religion, University of Southern California
Date: Thursday, February 11, 2021 | Time: 09:00 AM Eastern Time
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"How Antisemitic is South Asian Antisemitism?"
Dr. Richard Benkin, US based Zionist & Human Rights Activist
Date: Thursday, February 18, 2021 | Time: 09:00 AM Eastern Time
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"Deconstructing Left-Wing Antisemitism in Post-Colonial India"
Priya Singh, Associate Director at Asia in Global Affairs, non-profit, independent research forum in Kolkata, India
Date: Thursday, March 4, 2021 | Time: 09:00 AM Eastern Time
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"Antisemitism from Innocence"
Professor P. V. Viswanath, Graduate Program Chair in the Department of Finance and Economics, Lubin School of Business, Pace University, New York
Date: Thursday, March 18, 2021 | Time: 09:00 AM Eastern Time
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"The Unnoticed Antisemitism in India"
Dr. Navras J. Aafreedi, Research Fellow, ISGAP, New York, USA; Assistant Professor, Department of History, Presidency University, Kolkata, India
Date: Thursday, April 8, 2021 | Time: 09:00 AM Eastern Time
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"Migratory Pakistani Antisemitism"
Professor Mehnaz Afridi, Director of the Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith Education Center and Associate Professor in Religious Studies, Manhattan College, New York
Date: Thursday, April 22, 2021 | Time: 09:00 AM Eastern Time
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"Instances of Antisemitism in the Indian Urdu Press"
Dr. Md. Muddassir Quamar, Associate Fellow, Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi, India
Date: Thursday, April 29, 2021 | Time: 09:00 AM Eastern Time
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"Re-Examining Secularism and Antisemitism in Bangladesh"
Naureen Rahim, Coordinator, Center for the Study of Genocide and Justice and Adjunct Faculty, School of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Independent University, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Date: Thursday, May 6, 2021 | Time: 09:00 AM Eastern Time
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"Stereotypes, Sublimations and Substitutions: Jews and Antisemitism in South Asian Literature in English"
Professor Anna Guttman, Department of English, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON, Canada and Chair, Association for Commonwealth Language and Literature Studies
Date: Thursday, May 20, 2021 | Time: 09:00 AM Eastern Time
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"Antisemitism in Popular Bengali Muslim Discourse"
Professor Mosarrap Hossain Khan, Assistant Professor, Jindal Global Law School, O. P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India
Date: Thursday, May 27, 2021 | Time: 09:00 AM Eastern Time
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Biographical Profiles of Speakers:
Dr Navras J. Aafreedi is an Assistant Professor in History at Presidency University, Kolkata, where he teaches courses in Genocide Studies, Jewish Studies, Minority Studies, and Interfaith Studies, and a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), New York. He is the author of the monograph Jews, Judaizing Movements and the Traditions of Israelite Descent in South Asia (2016), several papers in peer-reviewed journals, and chapters in edited books published by prestigious publishing houses. He has also published in quasi-academic publications, leading newspapers, and popular media, and guest edited four special thematic issues for the online magazine Café Dissensus. Other than English, his writings have also appeared in German, Spanish and Urdu. He writes on Genocide Studies, Indo-Judaic Studies, Interfaith Relations, Antisemitism Studies, and Jewish Literary History, with focus on South Asia. He has spoken at scholarly forums in all continents except South America and held visiting fellowships at the universities of Tel Aviv and Sydney, and at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge, UK. He was a scholar-in-residence at St. John’s College, Oxford for the ISGAP Summer Institute on Curriculum Development in Critical Antisemitism Studies in 2017 and is a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) for two years, 2020-22. He is a Fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention Program since 2014.
Professor Mehnaz M. Afridi is the Director of the Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith Education Center and Associate Professor in Religious Studies at Manhattan College, New York. She is the author of the monograph Shoah through Muslim Eyes (Boston: Academic Studies Press) and the co-editor of Orhan Pamuk and Global Literature: Existentialism and Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Her research on Naguib Mahfouz and Modern Islamic Identity earned her the degree of PhD in Religious Studies from the University of South Africa in 2009. Committed to interfaith work, contemporary Islam, and Holocaust education, she teaches courses on Islam, world religions, genocide studies, and contemporary Islamic Literature. Her work has appeared in edited books such as Sacred Tropes: Tanakh, New Testament, and Qur’an as Literature and Culture (Brill, 2006) and Not Your Father’s Anti-Semitism: Hatred of the Jews in the 21st Century (Paragon House, 2008).
Dr Richard L. Benkin is a US based human rights activist. He received a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and is the author of A Quiet Case of Ethnic Cleansing: The Murder of Bangladesh’s Hindus (2012) and What is Moderate Islam? (2017).
Firestone, Reuven Firestone is a rabbi and the Regenstein Professor in medieval Judaism and Islam at HUC-JIR, and affiliate professor at the USC School of Religion. Author of eight books and over one hundred scholarly articles on Judaism, Islam, their relationship with one another and Christianity, Firestone lectures in the US, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He is active on the boards of numerous scholarly journals and boards and commissions treating interreligious relations and dialogue. Firestone served as Vice President of the Association for Jewish Studies and President of the International Qur’anic Studies Association.
Dr. Anna Guttman is a professor in the department of English at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where she teaches postcolonial literature. She is the chair of the Association for Commonwealth Language and Literature Studies, the oldest and largest international organization dedicated to the study of postcolonial literature. She is the author of Writing Indians and Jews: Metaphorics of Jewishness in South Asian Literature (2013) and The Nation of India in Contemporary Indian Literature (2007) and co-editor of The Global Literary Field (2006). She publishes in a variety of areas, including Jewish studies, gender and sexuality studies, globalization studies, and popular culture.
Dr Mosarrap H. Khan is Assistant Professor at Jindal Global Law School, O. P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India and a founding-editor at Café Dissensus, an online journal of literature, culture, and politics. He received his Ph.D. in South Asian literatures and cultures from the Department of English, New York University, USA, in 2018. His doctoral dissertation argues that South Asian Muslim writers’ attention to ordinary practices of illicit love, “modern” education, and consumerism, in contrast to extraordinary events, produces a discourse on the complex negotiation between the sacral and the secular by Muslims at the contemporary moment. Through advancing a new conceptual category of “worldly subjectivity”, he demonstrates the instabilities and inconsistencies in Muslim subject formation torn between religious commitment and worldly desires. His latest publications include, “The Idea of a University and the Invention of Culture in Colonial/Post-colonial India” (2018) and “Transgressive Desire, Everyday Life, and the Production of ‘Modernity’ in Pakistani Anglophone Fiction” (2018). Currently, he is co-editing a book, ‘Mapping Muslim Life in West Bengal’. In addition, he is converting his doctoral dissertation into a monograph.
Dr Md. Muddassir Quamar is associated with the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi. He holds a Ph.D. in Middle East studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University. His doctoral thesis focused on social dynamics in Saudi Arabia in the context of the tensions between two seemingly non-harmonious trends; Islamization and modernization. He has wider interest in Gulf societies, political Islam, Middle East geopolitics and India’s relations with the Middle East. His research papers have appeared in leading international journals, has co-authored three books including India’s Saudi Policy: Bright to the Gulf (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), co-edited four anthologies including Changing Security Paradigm in West Asia: Regional and International Responses (Knowledge World, 2020) and contributed numerous chapters published in anthologies across the world. Dr. Quamar regularly contributes opinion articles on developments in the Persian Gulf, Middle East and India’s relations with the region. In 2014-15, he was Visiting Fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, Riyadh. Since its inception Dr. Quamar has been associated with the Middle East Institute, New Delhi in various capacities including serving as Associate Editor of its flagship journal, the Contemporary Review of the Middle East.
Naureen Rahim is an Adjunct Lecturer at the School of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Independent University, Bangladesh and the Coordinator at the Center for the Study of Genocide and Justice, Liberation War Museum (LWM). Naureen holds an LLM in International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights (University of Geneva) & MSS in Criminology and Criminal Justice (University of Dhaka). She also possesses a postgraduate diploma in Genocide Studies from the Center for Genocide Studies, University of Dhaka. She has been contributing to the research on Rohingya genocide by the LWM; the outcome of the research includes two publications- “The Testimony of Sixty” and “The Rohingya Genocide: Compilation and Analysis of Survivors” (co-edited). Her forthcoming publication is a chapter titled “Citizenship and Statelessness” in Bangladesh and International Law, edited by Mohammad Shahabuddin for Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series (February 2021). Her areas of interest are international crimes, international humanitarian law, migration, cultural property etc.
Priya Singh is Associate Director and Programme Coordinator at Asia in Global Affairs (AGA, www.asiainglobalaffairs.in ), a non-profit, independent forum for research. She is the author of the monograph Foreign Policy Making in Israel: Domestic Influences (2005) and editor of the books Perspectives on West Asia: The Evolving Geopolitical Discourses (2012) and Democracy in Asia: Discourses and Counter-Discourses (2012). She has also co-edited several books. She has also published in prestigious peer reviewed journals and serves on the editorial boards of a few of them. A political scientist, Singh has been Fellow at the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Kolkata, an autonomous institute under the Ministry of Culture, Government of India (2002-2016) and a Researcher at the Calcutta Research Group for a Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung project on ‘Asian Connectivity’ (2017-2018). She taught at the Loreto College, Kolkata from 1998 to 2001.
Dr P.V. Viswanath is Professor of Finance and Graduate Program chair in the Finance department at the Lubin School of Business in New York City. He speaks around a dozen languages, including Tamil, Yiddish, French, German, Hebrew and Spanish. He is currently studying Sanskrit and Mandarin Chinese. His research is mainly in the area of corporate finance and microfinance. However he also works in the intersection of religion, law and economics. A recent publication examines the nature of gifts in an ancient Buddhist vinaya text, while work in progress includes the economy of ancient India as reflected in the works of the medieval Indian poet, Kalidasa, sale and purchase contracts in ancient Hindu legal texts; and the nature of gifts described in 11th century Cairo geniza correspondence among Jewish Indian ocean traders.
Dr. Navras J. Aafreedi, Research Fellow, Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), New York
navras.aafreedi@isgap.org