The Europe Center announces the international conference, “History and Responsibility: Hebrew Literature and 1948” which will take place at Stanford University on June 13-14, 2011. The aim of this conference is to consider some six decades of literary reflection on the 1948 Middle Eastern war, an event that resulted with the establishment of Israel on the one hand, and with the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, the Nakba on the other hand.

In recent decades there has been extensive discussion of 1948 in historiography. Many novels, films, journals, exhibitions, anthologies and political essays of recent years also display a keen interest in revisiting 1948. It is our wish to address this context from the perspective of literary studies, and to do so with a strong emphasis on maintaining a theoretical, comparative dimension, i.e. raise questions that result from recent theoretical debates on historical representation, postcolonial discourse, literature and philosophy, literature and ethics, and so forth.   

The conference thus wishes to discuss different forms of literary engagement with the past (poetry, drama and prose); the literary relation to ethical and political questions surrounding 1948; changes in the literary dealing with 1948 from the late 1940s to the present; as well as public debates surrounding the literary engagement with 1948.

This conference is sponsored by The Europe Center, with co-sponsors The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the School of Humanities and Sciences, The Taube Center for Jewish Studies, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, The Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, the Center for Ethics and Society, along with The Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

A full conference schedule can be found here.

The logic of partitioning the land has dominated the various attempts to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Several developments in the last few years cast serious doubts regarding the feasibility of partition. This talk seeks to critically explore alternatives to partition in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. More specifically, it seeks to examine feasible, reasonable, and fairly just alternatives to partition that would secure the national and individual rights, interests and identities of Arabs and Jews alike.

Bashir Bashir is a research fellow at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and a Civic Education and Leadership Fellow at Maxwell School of Citizenship at Syracuse University. He holds a Ph.D. and Master’s degree in Political Theory from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Bachelor’s degree in Politics, Sociology and Anthropology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has taught Political Theory at the London School of Economics, Queen's University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  His primary research interests are democratic theories of inclusion, multiculturalism, civic education, conflict resolution and the politics of reconciliation, historical injustices, Palestinian nationalism, and Israeli politics.  Among Bashir's publications is: Will Kymlicka and Bashir Bashir (eds.), The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

War Photographer is director Christian Frei's 2001 film that followed photojournalist James Nachtwey. Natchtwey started work as a newspaper photographer in New Mexico in 1976 and in 1980, he moved to New York to begin a career as a freelance magazine photographer. His first foreign assignment was to cover civil strife in Northern Ireland in 1981 during the IRA hunger strike. Since then, Nachtwey has devoted himself to documenting wars, conflicts and critical social issues. He has worked on extensive photographic essays in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil and the United States.

The film received an Academy Award Nomination for "Best Documentary Feature" and won twelve International Filmfestivals.

Richard Goldstone served on South Africa's Transvaal Supreme Court from 1980 to 1989 and the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court from 1990 to 1994. During the transition from apartheid to multiracial democracy, Goldstone headed the Goldstone Commission investigations into political violence in South Africa. He was credited with playing an indispensable role in the transition and became a household name in South Africa, attracting widespread international support and interest. Goldstone's work investigating violence led to him being nominated to serve as the first chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. On his return to South Africa he took up a seat on the newly-established Constitutional Court of South Africa. In 2009, Goldstone led an independent fact-finding mission created by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate international human rights and humanitarian law violations related to the Gaza War.

James Campbell's research focuses on African American history and the wider history of the black Atlantic. He is particularly interested in the long history of interconnections and exchange between Africa and America, a history that began in the earliest days of the transatlantic slave trade and continues into our own time.  In recent years, his research has moved in the direction of so-called “public history," the ways in which societies tell stories about their pasts, not only in textbooks and academic monographs but also in historic sites, museums, memorials, movies, and political movements.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. He is cofounder and director of the Israel Program on Constitutional Government, a member of the Policy Advisory Board at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and served as a senior consultant to the President's Council on Bioethics. His scholarship focuses on the interplay of law, ethics, and politics in modern society. His current research is concerned with the material and moral preconditions of liberal democracy in America and abroad.

Born in New York in 1977, Nir Rosen has been reporting from Iraq since April of 2003 and has spent most of the last seven and a half years in Iraq. He recently returned from a trip to seven provinces in the country. He has also reported from Afghanistan, Pakistan, the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Mexico, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, Turkey and Egypt. He has written for magazines such as The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and most major American publications. He has filmed documentaries. He is a Fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security. His new book, Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World, is about occupation, resistance, sectarianism and civil war from Iraq to Lebanon to Afghanistan.