FR27. August 2021

Contending Modernities

Contending Modernities, an interdisciplinary initiative based at University of Notre Dame that aims to develop a nuanced understanding of how religious and secular forces interact in today´s world, has published an article of Bashir Bashir, curator of Regionalism and Borders at the Kreisky Forum.

In the article Bashir Bashir, who is also Associate Professor at the Open University in Israel, demonstrates how the recent book The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement and Beyond is closely intertwined with the work on Alternatives to Partition and his earlier book The Holocaust and the Nakba, and a result of a more than a decade long process of reflection and debate among scholars at the Kreisky Forum.

MI14. Juli 2021

Ari Rath Preis für kritischen Journalismus 2021

Der „Ari-Rath-Preis für kritischen Journalismus“ wurde auf der Basis einer Privatinitiative eingerichtet, um im Sinne des im Jänner 2017 verstorbenen renommierten ehemaligen Chefredakteurs der Jerusalem Post Journalistinnen und Journalisten auszuzeichnen, die sich in ihrer Arbeit um eine kritische und der Wahrung der Menschenrechte verpflichtete Berichterstattung über Flucht, Vertreibung und Asyl in hervorragender Weise verdient gemacht haben.
Eine Jury von Expertinnen und Experten unter dem Vorsitz von Gertraud Auer Borea d’Olmo, der Generalsekretärin des Bruno Kreisky Forums für internationalen Dialog und enge Vertraute von Ari Rath, hat einstimmig Thomas Seifert für den „Ari Rath Preis für kritischen Journalismus“ 2021 vorgeschlagen.
Der „Ari Rath Ehrenpreis“ wurde einstimmig Gideon Levy zuerkannt.
Die Verleihung fand am 21. Juni 2021 im Bruno Kreisky Forum statt.

Thomas Seifert ist vielen Leserinnen und Lesern als außenpolitischer Experte und Wirtschaftsfachmann bekannt. Der heutige stellvertretende Chefredakteur der Wiener Zeitung war zuvor für News, aber auch Welt am Sonntag und Sunday Telegraph als Reporter in zahlreichen Krisenregionen der Welt unterwegs und hat beeindruckende Berichte verfasst: sei es im Jahr 2000 aus der Ebola Station des Spitals in Gulu, Uganda, oder aus Sierra Leone über Kindersoldaten oder über den Krieg in Tschetschenien. Mutig und engagiert berichtete er aus Afghanistan und 2003 aus dem Irak-Krieg in Mitten des US-Bombardements.
Immer stellt Seifert neben der Gesamteinschätzung der Krisensituation das Schicksal der betroffenen Menschen ins Zentrum seiner Artikel, Berichte und Kommentare. Dem ist auch hinzuzufügen, dass er immer die menschliche Perspektive der von Kriegen, Flucht und Vertreibungen und Naturkatastrophen geplagten Individuen hervorhebt, und damit den Verfolgten in dieser Welt eine Stimme verleiht.
Die Laudatio für den Preisträger hielt Oliver Rathkolb, Univ.-Prof. am Institut für Zeitgeschichte der Universität Wien und Mitglied der Jury.

Gideon Levy ist Kolumnist bei Haaretz und Mitglied der Redaktion der Zeitung. Levy kam 1982 zu Haaretz und war vier Jahre lang stellvertretender Herausgeber der Zeitung. Er ist Autor des wöchentlichen Twilight Zone-Beitrags, der die israelische Besetzung im Westjordanland und im Gazastreifen in den letzten 25 Jahren behandelt, sowie Autor politischer Leitartikel für die Zeitung.Levy erhielt 2008 den Euro-Med-Journalistenpreis und den Leipziger Freiheitspreis 2001; der Preis der israelischen Journalistenunion 1997; und der Preis der Vereinigung der Menschenrechte in Israel für 1996; 2016 gemeinsam mit dem lutherischen Pastor von Bethlehem Mitri Raheb den Olof Palme Preis für „seinen Kampf gegen Besetzung und Gewalt“. Sein neues Buch „The Punishment of Gaza“ wurde gerade im Verso Publishing House in London und New York veröffentlicht.
Die Laudatio für den Ehrenpreisträger hielt Alexandra Föderl-Schmid, stellvertretende Chefredakteurin Süddeutsche Zeitung und selbst Ar Rath Preisträgerin.

Den musikalischen Rahmen gestaltete Isabel Frey // Revolutionary Yiddish Music // Vienna

Wir bedanken uns bei WIEN ENERGIE für die freundliche Unterstützung.

DO17. Juni 2021

Putin Gives Positive Review of Meeting with Biden

President Biden and President Putin met in Geneva on June 16, 2021 for two and a half hours. Putin gave a positive overall evaluation in his press conference afterwards. It’s the first time the countries’ leaders have met in Geneva since 1985, and marks the latest chapter in the long and often consequential history of such meetings. To dig deeper, Christiane Amanpour speaks with our curator Nina Khrushcheva, Professor for International Affairs/The New Shool and with Richard Haass, President ot the Council on Foreign Relations.
Amanpour is the Chief International Anchor for CNN and host of CNN International’s nightly interview program Amanpour. She is also the host of Amanpour & Company on PBS.

FR07. Mai 2021

STALINS’S WAR AND PEACE

Nina Khrushcheva, Professor of International Affairs at The New School, is the co-author (with Jeffrey Tayler), most recently, of In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones, reviews four recent books on Soviet history that may provide lessons for dealing with modern Russia.

Read more:
Stalin’s War and Peace by Nina L. Khrushcheva – Project Syndicate

 

DO18. März 2021

Global book talks on „The Arab and Jewish Questions“

The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond, edited by Bashir Bashir und Leila Farsakh, and published by Columbia University Press, encompasses a 10 years‘ journey of engagement undertaken by Jewish and Arab scholars and activists at the Bruno Kreisky Forum.

First presented in Vienna in January 2021 together with the Central European University, it presently tours the world.

 

 

MO22. Februar 2021

WANT ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN PEACE? TRY CONFEDERATION

Politicians and experts should not doubt a two-state solution. But they should finally consider a plausible version of it.

By Bernard Avishai and Sam Bahour

published in New York Times, February 12, 2021

A Biden administration — not visionary, but simply cleareyed — could make the difference. It could, immediately, insist that the Israeli government remove barriers to letting Palestinian entrepreneurs from, say, Kuwait or Dearborn, Mich., settle and build new businesses in the cities of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The administration should encourage a common market with Israel, Palestine and Jordan, and press for completion of the Quartet-sponsored gas pipeline that could bring electricity and desalinized water to Gaza.
The key is to save Israelis and Palestinians from anachronism. And each other.

Sam Bahour is an American-Palestinian who lives in Ramallah in the West Bank and is a management consultant.
Bernard Avishai, an American-Israeli professor and writer for magazines, lives in Jerusalem.
They have proposed a confederation to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for years.

Read more

MO22. Februar 2021

FROM THE JEWISH QUESTION TO THE PALESTINIAN QUESTION

by BRIAN KLUG

In the old Europe, Jews paid the ultimate price for ‘the Jewish Question’ with the Shoah. As the Shoah led to the Nakba, the cost was transferred to the Palestinians. Now, with the New Europe, the Palestinians pay the price again. They pay twice over: once for Jews being the stigmatised Other and a second time for Jews being the valorised Other. First they pay the price for the antisemitic exclusion of Jews in Europe. Then they pay for their anti-antisemitic inclusion. The cloak of despised Other has settled firmly on the shoulders of the Palestinian in Israel’s midst, like a hand-me-down. The ‘Jewish Question’ in Europe has turned into the ‘Palestinian Question’ in Israel. Such are the vicissitudes of European Jewish otherness.

Brian Klug (* born in London) is senior research fellow and tutor in philosophy at St. Benet’s Hall, Oxford and a member of the philosophy faculty at Oxford University. He is also an honorary fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton and fellow of the College, Saint Xavier University, Chicago.

Klug is a contributor to the book The Arab and Jewish Questions,edited by Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh and published by Columbia University Press in November 2020. This text was presented as part of the Oxford Book Talk on February 9, 2021.

Read more

FR22. Jänner 2021

Zum 110. Geburtstag von Bruno Kreisky: NOBODY IS PERFECT

Am 22. Jänner 2021 wäre Bruno Kreisky 110 Jahre alt geworden.

Kreisky war von 1970 bis 1983 Bundeskanzler der Republik Österreich und hat wie kaum ein anderer Politiker unser Land geprägt und verändert. Zu Beginn seines Lebens hat er sich für Österreich gegen das faschistische Regime gewehrt, als Bundeskanzler hat er erfolgreich für ein fortschrittliches Österreich gekämpft. Bruno Kreisky hat die Gesellschaft um ein großes Stück gerechter gemacht, modernisiert und die Arbeitswelt humanisiert.

Der Philosoph, Schriftsteller und Literaturkritiker Franz Schuh hat zum 110. Geburtstag eine bemerkenswerte Rede mit Titel NOBODY IS PERFECT. BRUNO KREISKY UND DER BEGRIFF DES POLITISCHEN verfasst.

Franz Schuh: NOBODY IS PERFECT

MO23. November 2020

Bashir Bashir, Leila Farsakh: The Arab and Jewish Questions

The Arab and Jewish Questions
Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond

Edited by Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh

Columbia University Press

 

Nineteenth-century Europe turned the political status of its Jewish communities into the “Jewish Question,” as both Christianity and rising forms of nationalism viewed Jews as the ultimate other. With the onset of Zionism, this “question” migrated to Palestine and intensified under British colonial rule and in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Zionism’s attempt to solve the “Jewish Question” created what came to be known as the “Arab Question,” which concerned the presence and rights of the Arab population in Palestine. For the most part, however, Jewish settlers denied or dismissed the question they created, to the detriment of both Arabs and Jews in Palestine and elsewhere.

This book brings together leading scholars to consider how these two questions are entangled historically and in the present day. It offers critical analyses of Arab engagements with the question of Jewish rights alongside Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish considerations of Palestinian identity and political rights. Together, the essays show that the Arab and Jewish questions, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which they have become subsumed, belong to the same thorny history. Despite their major differences, the historical Jewish and Arab questions are about the political rights of oppressed groups and their inclusion within exclusionary political communities—a question that continues to foment tensions in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Shedding new light on the intricate relationships among Orientalism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, colonialism, and the impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this book reveals the inseparability of Arab and Jewish struggles for self-determination and political equality.

The book heavily draws on conversations in the frame of the Kreisky Forum’s project “Arab Engagements with Jewish Question” and “Jewish Engagements with the Arab Question”.
Contributors include Gil Anidjar, Brian Klug, Amal Ghazal, Ella Shohat, Hakem Al-Rustom, Hillel Cohen, Yuval Evri, Derek Penslar, Jacqueline Rose, Moshe Behar, Maram Masarwi, and the editors, Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh.
About the Author

Bashir Bashir is associate professor in the Department of Sociology, Political Science, and Communication at the Open University of Israel and a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He is coeditor of The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies (2008) and The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia, 2018).

Leila Farsakh is associate professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her books include Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, Land, and Occupation, second edition (2012)

 

SO25. Oktober 2020

Sam Bahour: PALESTINIANS ARE DONE CONCEDING

Palestinians are done conceding
Only a Palestinian institutional rebirth can end this conflict

by Sam Bahour, Writer, businessperson, activist

Western countries, especially European ones, have a track record of failing Palestine and Israel. Since the outset of this Middle East conflict, these powers have used the tremendous leverage they have on only one party — the Palestinians. At times, they punished Palestinians with military might. When that did not work, they added efforts to financially strangulate the Palestinian national liberation movement. When they realized the Palestinians were not going to vanish, they became innovative in their political and diplomatic discourse to divert Palestinians away from restoring what was forcefully taken from them upon the creation of the state of Israel. At no time in history have Western powers seriously held Israel accountable to get it to change its ways. Instead, they have paved the way for Israeli impunity, all the while funding them, arming them, and covering up for them in the international arena.

 

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