Wednesday 4/9 @ 6:00PM

Labyrinth Books

122 Nassau Street

On the occasion of the paperback release of Amy Kaplan’s Our American Israel, Chris Hedges, Ian Lustick, and Joan Scott discuss Kaplan’s essential account of America’s most controversial alliance and how that strong and divisive partnership plays out in our own time.

In 1945, it was not inevitable that a global superpower emerging victorious from World War II would come to identify with a small state for Jewish refugees, refugees who at that time were still being turned away from the United States. How, then, did so many in America come to feel that the bond between it and Israel was historically inevitable, morally right, and a matter of common sense. Our American Israel reveals how Israel’s identity has long been entangled with America’s belief in its own exceptional nature. Beginning at the end of World War II with debates about the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and continuing through both the rise of evangelical Christian Zionism and the war on terror, Amy Kaplan challenges the associations underlying this special alliance.

In America today, Israel’s political realities pose profoundly difficult challenges. Turning a critical eye on the turbulent history that bound the two nations together, Kaplan unearths the roots of present controversies that threaten to divide them.

Amy Kaplan was Edward W. Kane Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of Our American Israel, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, and The Social Construction of American Realism, she was a past president of the American Studies Association and was awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

Chris Hedges was a war correspondent for 2 decades in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, 15 of them with The New York Times, where he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of fourteen books, including War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War and Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison. He writes a column every Monday for ScheerPost and has a show, The Chris Hedges Report, on The Real News. He holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard University and has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and The University of Toronto. He has taught students earning their college degree from Rutgers University in the New Jersey prison system since 2010.

Ian Lustick is a recipient of awards from the Carnegie Corporation, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Sciences Research Council. He is a past president of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association and of the Association for Israel Studies, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Among his books are Unsettled States, Disputed Lands; Trapped in the War on Terror; and Paradigm Lost. He is Chair of the Political Science Department of the University of Pennsylvania.

Joan Wallach Scott is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and adjunct professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her many books include the classic Gender and the Politics of History, The Politics of the Veil, and Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom.