The CJC invites you to our annual 2022 Hal Israel Endowed Lectureship in Jewish-Catholic Relations. This year, Professor Magda Teter will discuss her recent book, Blood Libel: On the Trail of An Antisemitic Myth. RSVP is required. Only those who register will receive the Zoom link to access the lecture. 

About the 2022 Hal Israel Endowed Lectureship in Jewish-Catholic Relations:

In 2019, a shooter of the synagogue in Poway near San Diego invoked the story of Simon of Trent, a Christian boy whose death in 1475 led to one of the most notorious trials of Jews in European history, as one of the reasons why he decided to attack and kill Jews. Since the Middle Ages, the death of a Christian child often resulted in violence against Jews, who were frequently blamed for the child’s death. While other anti-Jewish libels waned, this one remains. Magda Teter’s talk will unpack the enduring power of this libel, and explain how and why it came to be rooted in Christian imagination, reaching beyond medieval Europe to contemporary America and the Middle East.

About the Speaker:

Magda Teter, Professor of History and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University, is the author of Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (2005), Sinners on Trial (2011), Blood Libel: On the Trail of An Antisemitic Myth (2020), and of dozens of articles in English, Hebrew, Italian, and Polish. Her book Blood Libel won the 2020 National Jewish Book Award, The George L. Mosse Prize from the American Historical Association, and the Roland H. Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society. Teter has received prestigious fellowships, including from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the NEH. She has served the Vice-President for Publications of the AJS.

About the Moderator:

Dr. Suzanne Brown-Fleming is a 2021 Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Contemporary History’s Center for Holocaust Studies in Munich and Berlin. Her current research project, “Il Papa Tedesco (The German Pope): Eugenio Pacelli and Germany, 1917–1958,” is a study of Pope Pius XII’s relationship to Germany and its bishops, leaders, and people during the Weimar era, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust. Her second project, “Opa War Ein Nazi (Grandpa Was a Nazi): Eduard Geist and the Crimes of the Third Reich,” is Dr. Brown-Fleming’s first attempt to research and write as both a decades-long scholar of the Holocaust and as the biological granddaughter of a devout and locally prominent Nazi. She has been featured in the Catholic News Service, Catholic News Agency, and The Catholic Virginian. Brown-Fleming has appeared on CNN, the EWTN Global Catholic Television Network, and in several documentaries, including Holy Silence (2019), which premiered nationwide on PBS television in 2020.