Antisemitism and Religion

“Why the Jews?” Join us as we explore this question again in the final event of USC Shoah Foundation’s Scholar Lab on Antisemitism event series. This moderated discussion will feature Dr. Mehnaz Afridi of Manhattan College and Dr. Sara Lipton of Stonybrook University, who are members of USC Shoah Foundation’s Scholar Lab on Antisemitism program. As part of the discussion, Dr. Afridi and Dr. Lipton will present on their research projects examining antisemitism in the Arab world and representations of Jews in medieval Christian sermons, respectively, focusing on the insights they gained into the causes, manifestations and consequences of antisemitism through history and in relation to religion. The discussion will be moderated by Dr. Jessica Marglin, Associate Professor of Religion at USC.

This event is the third in the three-part event series associated with USC Shoah Foundation’s Scholar Lab on Antisemitism. 

Speaker bios

Mehnaz Afridi, PhD

Dr. Afridi is Professor of Religious studies and Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan College. She teaches courses on Islam, the Holocaust, Genocide, comparative religion, and Feminism. Her recent book Shoah through Muslim Eyes (Academic Studies Press, 2017) was nominated for the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research and the Jacob Schnitzer Book Award. She is currently working on a book, The Wounded Muslim, (Lexington Books, forthcoming) and a co-edited book on “International Approaches to the Holocaust”, (Nebraska University Press, forthcoming). In 2019 she was awarded the Costello Award for teaching excellence in the School of Liberal Arts at Manhattan College.

Dr. Afridi obtained her Ph.D. from University of South Africa, her M.A. and B.A. from Syracuse University.

Sara Lipton, PhD

Dr. Lipton is Professor of History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her research focuses on religious identity and experience, Jewish-Christian relations, and art and culture in the high and later Middle Ages (11th–15th centuries). Dr. Lipton publications include Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (Winner, Jordan Schnitzer Book Award, Association for Jewish Studies), Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Winner, John Nicholas Brown Prize, The Medieval Academy of America Finalist, Koret/National Foundation for Jewish Culture History Book Award), and many others. Dr. Lipton is the recipient of several awards, grants, and fellowships, including most recently the fellowship of the Medieval Academy of America.

She received her MA and PhD in Medieval Studies from Yale University.

Moderator bio

Jessica Marglin, PhD

Dr. Marglin is the Ruth Ziegler Early Career Chair in Jewish Studies and Associate Professor of Religion, Law and History at the University of Southern California. Her work focuses on the history of Jews and Jewish-Muslim relations in modern North Africa and the Mediterranean.  More broadly, Professor Marglin is interested in the history of Jews in the Islamic world, in Sephardic history, and in Mediterranean Studies. Her first book project, Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco, is a study of Jews in the Moroccan legal system in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Professor Marglin’s forthcoming monograph, The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship across the Modern Mediterranean, centers around a nineteenth-century lawsuit over the estate of a wealthy Tunisian Jew, reimagining how we think about Jews, the Mediterranean, and belonging in the nineteenth century. She received her PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.