Classics Program Open House
2024-09-18 16:00 - 17:30 (America/Chicago) | UWM Curtin Hall, Room 839, 3243 North Downer Avenue, Milwaukee, WI, 53211, United States
Everyone is welcome to attend! Pizza and refreshments will be served!
For more information, or to request accommodations, please email dewesolow@uwm.edu.

Searching for Raphael Lemkin: On the Study of Jewish Universalism
2024-09-19 15:00 - 16:00 | UWM Lubar Entrepreneurship Center, 2100 E. Kenwood Blvd., Milwaukee, WI, 53211, United States
How does the particular produce the universal? In this seminar, Dr. James Loeffler will discuss how Jewish Studies engages this question by drawing on research on Raphael Lemkin’s creation of the legal concept of genocide in interwar Polish Jewish culture.
James Loeffler is Felix Posen Professor of Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University, and co-editor of the Association for Jewish Studies Review. His writings include two award-winning books, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century and The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire, and two edited volumes, The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century and A Jew in the Street: New Views on European Jewish History. He is currently writing a book about antisemitism and the First Amendment in postwar America, which grew out of his Atlantic magazine article about his coverage of the trial of the White Supremacist organizers of the 2017 attack on Charlottesville.

The Crime of Menticide: Antisemitism and Hate Speech in American Law
2024-09-19 19:00 - 20:00 | UWM Golda Meir Library, 4th Floor Conference Center, 2311 East Hartford Avenue, Milwaukee, WI, 53211, United States
The 2024 Sam and Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies, Distinguished Lecture by James Loeffler. This event is both in-person or via Zoom. To register for the Zoom link see https://wisconsin-edu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_8tdtZrqyTdecQvrjdfKEyg#/registration
Can law limit hate speech without violating the First Amendment? In 1977, a group of Holocaust survivors from Skokie, Illinois filed a class action lawsuit to stop a planned neo-Nazi march by alleging menticide — the psychological equivalent of genocide. Nazi words and symbols constituted a form of violence, they claimed, not constitutionally protected speech. In this lecture, historian James Loeffler reconstructs this curious episode and discusses its larger implications for the contemporary debate over antisemitism and free speech in American law.
James Loeffler is Felix Posen Professor of Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University, and co-editor of the Association for Jewish Studies Review. His writings include two award-winning books, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century and The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire, and two edited volumes, The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century and A Jew in the Street: New Views on European Jewish History. He is currently writing a book about antisemitism and the First Amendment in postwar America, which grew out of his Atlantic magazine article about his coverage of the trial of the White Supremacist organizers of the 2017 attack on Charlottesville.
Contact Rachel Baum at rbaum@uwm.edu or 414-229-5156 with questions or for assistance.
