About the Event

A panel conversation on the release of “Israel: What Went Wrong?” (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2026) with author Omer Bartov and panelists Laura Jockusch, Nadje Al-Ali, Orwa Switat and Erica Weiss. 

About the Book

In “Israel: What Went Wrong?”, Bartov sketches the tragic transformation of Zionism, a movement that sought to emancipate European Jewry from oppression, into a state ideology of ethno-nationalism. How is it possible, he asks, that a state founded in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, an event that gave legitimacy to a national home for the Jews, stands credibly accused of perpetrating large-scale war crimes? How do we come to terms with the fact that Israel’s war of destruction is being conducted with the support, laced with denial and indifference, of so many of its Jewish citizens? Tracing the roots of the violent events currently unfolding in Israel and the occupied territories, Bartov tracks his country’s moral tribulations and considers the origins of Zionism, the intertwining of Israel’s independence with Palestinian displacement, the politics of the Holocaust, controversies over the term “genocide,” and the uncertain future. The result is an urgent critique that addresses today’s debates over Zionism and the future of Israel.

About the Author

Omer Bartov is an Israeli-American scholar and Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. He has written widely on war crimes, interethnic relations, and genocide. Recent books, published in multiple languages, include “Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz” (2018), which won the National Jewish Book Award, and “Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis” (2023), named Choice 2024 Outstanding Academic Title. Bartov’s essays and commentaries have been widely featured in national and international magazines and media outlets. His new book, Israel: What Went Wrong? will be published in April 2026 by Farrar Straus & Giroux in the US and Penguin/Random Books in the UK, as well as in several European languages and in Chinese.

About the Panelists

Laura Jockusch is an associate professor and holds the Albert Abramson Chair in Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University. She wrote “Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe” (Oxford UP 2012, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and co-winner of the Sybil Milton Book Prize) and “Jewish Revenge and the Holocaust: History, Memory and Imagination” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025); she edited “Khurbn-Forshung: Documents on Early Holocaust Research in Postwar Poland” (Göttingen, 2022); and co-edited (with Gabriel Finder) “Jewish Honor Courts: Revenge, Retribution and Reconciliation in Europe and Israel after the Holocaust” (Detroit, 2015) and most recently with Devin Pendas, “Cambridge History of the Holocaust” (vol. IV Aftermath, Outcomes, Repercussions; Cambridge UP, 2025). Her current research explores Jewish conceptions of post-Holocaust justice; the trials of Stella Goldschlag (aka Kübler-Isaaksohn) in postwar Germany.

Nadje Al-Ali is Robert Family Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology and Middle East studies at Brown University. Her main research interests revolve around feminist activism and gendered mobilization, mainly with reference to Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and the Kurdish political movement. Recent publications include (jointly with Deniz Kandiyoti and Kathryn Spellman Poots) “Gender, Governance & Islam” (University of Edinburgh Press, 2019) and “Resisting Far-Right Politics in the Middle East and Europe: Queer Feminist Critiques” (ed. With Tunay Altay and Katharina Galor, University of Edinburgh Press, 2024).

Orwa Switat is a postdoctoral research associate in Palestinian studies at Brown University. Switat is an urban planning scholar whose research integrates planning theory, spatial justice, and heritage preservation, with attention to how spatial and infrastructural conditions shape everyday life, particularly in contexts of political constraint and marginalization.

Erica Weiss is an anthropologist and a visiting associate professor in the Program in Judaic Studies at Brown University during the 2025-6 year. She researches liberalism and its discontents, tolerance and coexistence, political theology and democratic inclusion. She conducts much of her work in Palestine/Israel. She is the PI of an European Research Council project titled the Praxis of Coexistence which is a comparative and bottom up investigation of non-state approaches to tolerance in religious and peripheral contexts.

Security Reminders:

Registration ticket and valid ID required for admission.

Photography and recordings are not permitted.

This talk will not be live-streamed.