In October 27, 2018, a white supremacist, infuriated with Jewish aid to refugees, killed eleven people and injured seven others in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. One of the many questions that followed the event was: “How could this happen here?” In this presentation, Dr. Slabodsky will explore why we see some of the most devastating attacks against Jews in societies where they have achieved the largest degree of assimilation. Aided by tools developed to understand the  construction of racism in decolonial studies, he will explain how this is not a paradox but actually a consequence of modern systems of domination. The job of those who struggle for justice, then, is not to compete with each other but to unveil and dismantle the structures that reproduce racism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia. 

Cosponsored by the Department of Religious Studies, Jewish Studies, the Humanities Center, Cultural Studies and the Honors College