The University of San Francisco is hosting a lecture series aimed at unraveling antisemitism and how it intersects with other forms of prejudice — a first for its Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice.
Professor Aaron J. Hahn Tapper said that the Swig program has offered more than 115 public events since he revamped the program in 2008, but no lecture series that focused solely on this topic.
The lecture series was “not spurred on by the recent substantial uptick in violence and death in Palestine and Israel,” he said Tuesday. It was created to go along with a new course he is teaching called “Antisemitism and Intersectionality,” as part of the school’s new graduate-level Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion + Jewish Studies and Social Justice (JEDI + JSSJ) certificate program.
“Sadly, this series is needed nonetheless,” Hahn Tapper said. “The goal is to center a conversation around the manifestation of antisemitism in the United States today.”
Eric Ward, a community organizer, civil rights advocate and executive vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based racial justice organization Race Forward, will deliver the next lecture in the series. His March 26 talk, titled “White Supremacy, Antisemitism and Anti-Black Racism: Origins and Intersectionality,” will address the connections between American racism and antisemitism. Ward will explore the topic further in a conversation with community organizer April Baskin, who has Black, Cherokee and Jewish heritage.
The series will continue on April 16 with a lecture on the connection between antisemitism and anti-Zionism amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
Leo Ferguson, director of strategic projects at New York-based Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, will discuss how these issues intertwine in a conversation with Rabbi Dev Noily, senior rabbi of Kehilla Community Synagogue in Piedmont.
The series kicked off Feb. 27 with an address by author, scholar and former Catholic priest James Carroll. He spoke of Christianity’s tumultuous relationship with antisemitism over the past two millennia in his talk titled “Antisemitism and the Catholic Church: An Unfinished Moral Reckoning.” Following his lecture, Carroll discussed the issue with Rabbi Beth Singer, senior rabbi of San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El.
“Three of the more important elements of antisemitism today are the role of the Catholic Church in generating and spreading anti-Jewish rhetoric and belief for hundreds of years, the ways that combating antisemitism is connected to other forms of discrimination such as anti-Black racism and the most recent ways that criticism, and sometimes inflammatory screeds, aimed at the State of Israel are sometimes one and the same as antisemitism and sometimes, of course, entirely not,” Hahn Tapper said.
USF is a private Jesuit university, founded in 1855. The Swig Judaic Studies program launched at USF in 1977 and was relaunched as the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice in 2008. The program hosts a number of annual events, including a social justice lecture, a human rights lecture and a social justice seder for Passover.