‘Israel’s Moment’: A History of the Establishment of the State of Israel

Tuition: $325 | YIVO members: $250**

This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.

Instructor: Jeffrey Herf

When the State of Israel was born, support for the Zionist project was strongest among liberals and left-leaning politicians and journalists in both New York City and in the U.S. Congress, as well as the Soviet Union. The most intense opposition at the time arose from leaders of the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the British Foreign Office. In this course, we will consider the important debates in the United Nations about the Partition Plan, the arms embargo, and details of truce resolutions and borders during the war of 1948. Students will also learn how to access important, now declassified documents of the State Department, and the CIA, and how to use the United Nations Official Documents System to examine UN records. Students will also read more recent historical scholarship on the events before, during and after the establishment of the Jewish state. The course will also touch upon Nazi antagonism to the Zionist project, and the history and significance of the collaboration with the Nazi regime by leading Arab nationalists and Islamists.

In view of the upcoming seventy-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the State of Israel this coming May, this course is particularly timely as it offers both a fresh look at these events, as well as a challenge to misconceptions about who supported and who opposed the Zionist project.

Course Materials:
Students should purchase the following book before the first date of class:

• Jeffrey Herf, Israel’s Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945-1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022) (Purchase)

The instructor will provide all other course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.

Jeffrey Herf is Distinguished University Professor, in the Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park, where he has taught Modern European, especially modern German History since 2000. On January 1, 2023, he will assume Emeritus status. He has published extensively on the origins, nature, consequences of Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust, and their aftermath in Europe and the Middle East, and on the history of antisemitism.

His published works include Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge U.P., 1984); Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Harvard U.P. 1997); The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard U.P., 2006); Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale University Press, 2009); Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967-1989 (Cambridge U.P., 2016), and, most recently, Israel's Moment: International Support and Opposition for Establishing the Jewish State, 1945-1949 (Cambridge U.P., 2022), which received the 2022 Bernard Lewis Prize. He is currently working on a collection of essays with the working title: “Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left and Islamist.

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