The Origins and Ideology of Hamas

YIVO’S THREE-PART WEBINAR SERIES

(New York, NY) – October 7, 2023, changed the Jewish world. In the midst of so much public debate governed largely by ideologically mass-produced cliches, antisemitic slogans, catchphrases, and historically uninformed rhetoric, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, devoted to education and historical truth, has developed a three-part webinar series to explore The Origins and Ideology of Hamas curated by historian Jeffrey Herf and featuring other highly regarded historians, such as Benny Morris and Matthias Küntzel. This series will elucidate the circumstances of Hamas’s origins and the development of its ideology, shed light on the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and explore the rise of global antisemitism in the wake of the October 7th massacres.

“Exploring the deep affiliations of radical Islamist Hamas with the antisemitic propaganda of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, this series exposes a painful point of intersection between Eastern European Jewish history and contemporary events,” said YIVO Executive Director and CEO Jonathan Brent. “The YIVO Institute is uniquely positioned to illuminate that nexus and unflinchingly probe its implications.”

“As shocking and awful as the Hamas attack of October 7 on Israelis was, it was not a surprise for those of us who have examined the Jew-hatred at the core of Hamas’s ideology,” said Herf. “It is a set of ideas that combined a distinctly Islamist interpretation of Islam that took shape in the 1930s and 1940s, survived in the Muslim Brotherhood after World War II, and persisted in the formation of Hamas in 1988. One aim of these webinars is to present the work of scholars who have examined that ideological background and its consequences.”

View the entire series: yivo.org/IdeologySeries.

SERIES EVENTS

What:            Hamas and the Origins of Islamic Antisemitism
When:           Monday, February 26, 2024 | 1:00pm ET
Where:          On Zoom
Cost:              Free
Register:       yivo.org/IdeologySeries1

Historians Matthias Küntzel and Jeffrey Herf discuss the origins of Hamas, the history of Islamic antisemitism, and its causal significance in the war of 1947-1948.

What:            Colonialism, Racism, and the Arab Israeli War of 1948
When:           Monday, March 25, 2024 | 1:00pm ET
Where:          On Zoom
Cost:              Free
Register:       yivo.org/IdeologySeries2

Historians Benny Morris and Jeffrey Herf discuss the international politics surrounding Israel’s establishment, the causes and nature of the war of 1948, and the controversies of how this history is understood in contemporary discourse.

What:            Responses to October 7th
When:           Tuesday, April 16, 2024| 1:00pm ET
Where:          On Zoom
Cost:              Free
Register:       yivo.org/IdeologySeries3

Historian Jeffrey Herf will lead a panel featuring scholars Meir Litvak, Norman Goda, Karin Stögner, and David Hirsh which will explore responses to Hamas’s October 7th massacres and to the state of Israel’s subsequent military response.

These programs are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. 

For more information contact:
Shelly Freeman
Chief of Staff

THE SPEAKERS

Jeffrey Herf Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, History at the University of Maryland. A focus of Herf’s work studies the intersection of ideas and politics in modern European history, specializing in twentieth century Germany. He has published extensively on Germany during the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and on West and East Germany during the Cold War. His research interests now focus on the Nazi period and German and European history in post-World War II dup to the collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War in 1989.

Matthias Küntzel is a political scientist based in Hamburg, Germany. Between 2004 and 2015, he was an external research associate at the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His published works include Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11 (2007) and Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East: The 1948 Arab War against Israel and the Aftershocks of World War II (2024). He is a member of the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin and the Advisory Board of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) in New York.

Benny Morris, a historian, was formerly a professor of history in the Middle East Studies Department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is the author of 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War and most recently, with Dror Ze’evi, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924.

Meir Litvak is a Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern History and a senior research associate at the Alliance Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University. His major field of research is the linkage between religion, society, and politics in modern Iranian Shi`ism and the linkage between nationalism and religion in the Muslim Middle East. Litvak has also researched antisemitism in Iran and in the Arab world, particularly attitudes towards the Holocaust and has written on the ideology of the Palestinian Hamas movement.

Norman Goda is the Norman and Irma Braman Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He studies modern European history and specializes in the history of the Holocaust, war crimes trials, and twentieth century diplomacy. He teaches courses on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany from historical and interdisciplinary perspectives. He is the author of Tomorrow the World: Hitler, Northwest Africa, and the Path toward America (1998); Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War (2007); The Holocaust: Europe, the World, and the Jews (2013). Goda has served as a consultant to the US and German governments, as well as for various radio, television, and film documentaries in the US, Europe, and Israel.

Karin Stögner is Professor of Sociology at the University of Passau. She received both her PhD and her Habilitation from the University of Vienna. Previously she did research and teaching at various universities, e.g. Goethe University Frankfurt, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Justus Liebig-University Gießen, University of Vienna, Lancaster University, Georgetown University and Central European University. Her research focuses on Critical Theory and feminist theory, on antisemitism, racism, nationalism, and sexism as well as on National Socialism and the post-national-socialist societies. She was coordinator of Research Network 31: Racism and Antisemitism until 2023.

David Hirsh has been in the sociology department at Goldsmiths, University of London since 2003. Hirsh has written Law Against Genocide: Cosmopolitan Trials, which focuses on two trials from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the trial of Andrei Sawoniuk for crimes committed during the Holocaust, and the David Irving libel case, coming to some tentative conclusions about the possibility of the emergence of cosmopolitan law. He is also the author of Contemporary Left Antisemitism, which examines case studies of openly antisemitic discourse which have emerged out of anti-Zionism, and it thinks about specifically sociological approaches to understanding contemporary antisemitism.

YIVO

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is dedicated to the preservation and study of the history and culture of East European Jewry worldwide. For nearly a century, YIVO has pioneered new forms of Jewish scholarship, research, education, and cultural expression. Our public programs and exhibitions, as well as online and on-site courses, extend our outreach to a global community. The YIVO Archives contains 24 million unique items and YIVO’s Library has over 400,000 volumes—the single largest resource for the study of East European Jewish life in the world. yivo.org / yivo.org/the-whole-story