Zionism is one of the most fraught terms in contemporary politics. But what exactly is Zionism, what is its history, and what have been (and are today) its many meanings to diverse groups? Why have so many embraced different versions of Zionism, and, on the flip side, why and how has Zionism been critiqued, both among its proponents as well as its detractors? What is the future of Zionism, particularly in the wake of Israel’s devastating assaults on Gaza and Lebanon following the Hamas organized massacres of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023? Please join the UCSC Center for Jewish Studies in a panel conversation featuring, Liora Halperin (University of Washington), Shaul Magid (Dartmouth), and Dov Waxman (UCLA); prominent scholars of the history of Zionism, who will address these questions and many more.

Prof. Halperin is Professor of International Studies and History, and Distinguished Endowed Chair of Jewish Studies, at the University of Washington. She is an historian of Israel/Palestine with particular interests in nationalism and collective memory, Jewish cultural and social history, language ideology and policy, and the politics of colonization and settlement. She is the author of The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past (Stanford, 2021), a study of the European Jewish agricultural colonies established in late nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine and the politics of their twentieth-century commemoration and Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 (Yale, 2015), which was awarded the Shapiro Prize from the Association for Israel Studies for the best book in Israel Studies. She is currently working on a book about the diverse urban Jewish communities of late 19th/early 20th century Ottoman Palestine and the way a wide range of later groups and political movements, both Zionist and anti-Zionist, have commemorated and promoted narratives about this history.

Shaul Magid teaches Modern Judaism at Harvard Divinity School and is a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard. He has written extensively on Zionism, anti-Zionism, Diasporism, and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. He is the author of many books and essays, most recently Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (2021) and The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (2023). His present book project is The Political Theology of Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar – Zionism as Anti-Messianism.

Dov Waxman is the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Professor of Israel Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is the author of four books: The Pursuit of Peace and The Crisis of Israeli Identity: Defending / Defining the Nation (2006), Israel’s Palestinians: The Conflict Within (2011), Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel (2016), and The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs to Know (2019). His writing has also been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Time, Slate, and many other publications.

This event is presented by the Center for Jewish Studies and co-sponsored by Porter College.