Magda Teter, Enduring Marks of Inferiority: On the Common Roots of Antisemitism and Anti-Black Racism

Tanenbaum Family Lecture

Magda Teter (Fordham University)

"Enduring Marks of Inferiority: On the Common Roots of Antisemitism and Anti-Black Racism"

Since the earliest days of Christianity, theologians expressed pervasive anxiety about Jews as equal members of society and, with European expansion in the early modern period, that anxiety extended to people of color. This troubling legacy still haunts us today. In her talk, Magda Teter will discuss how theological and legal frameworks created by the church centuries ago laid the seeds of what would in modern times become antisemitism and anti-Black racism and how it provided a framework for antisemitic tropes of "Jewish power."

Magda Teter is Professor of History and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University. She 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 Ronald Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society. Her new book Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in 2023. Teter has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the NYPL, and others. She is currently the President of the American Academy of Jewish Research.

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This lecture will be delivered in-person at JHB100 and virtually via Zoom. To attend virtually, please click THIS LINK on Monday, February 6 at 4 PM.