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Events Fall 2007
10th Annive
rsary of CGES
The Center for German and European Studies (CGES) at Brandeis University is holding a conference in cooperation with the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung in celebration of CGES' 10th anniversary. The topic of the conference will be the situation of Muslim communities in Europe. German Ambassador to the United States Klaus Scharioth will give the Keynote Address.
There are perhaps 20 million Muslims living among the EU's more than 500 million citizens. Their origins are diverse, mainly immigrants from Europe's ex-colonial areas who have migrated to the lands of the ex-colonialists: East Indians to the UK, Indonesians to the Netherlands, North Africans to France, Turks, largely economic immigrants, to Germany and Belgium, and their ties to Islam vary greatly. Immigration is a difficult subject that often triggers anxiety and xenophobia in the host societies, as Americans should know. Yet there are few important issues about which there is more fear and ignorance than the presence of Islamic communities in EU Europe today, undoubtedly because many Europeans societies have little experience with mass immigration, but also because of world and Middle Eastern politics, the demographics of these Islamic communities, and, last but not least, of incidents of terrorism. This conference seeks to move beyond such fear and ignorance to begin exploring the nature and diversity of Europe's many different Islamic communities, the real places that they occupy in the tapestry that is EU Europe, the complexities of the issues that they face, and their prospects.
2:30 pm Keynote Address by Ambassador Klaus Scharioth
3:30 pm Friedrich-Ebert-Brandeis sponsored Panel
Rapaporte Treasure Hall, Goldfarb Library
October 10, 2007, 2:30 pm - 5:00 pm
Panelist Biographies:
Sebnem Koser Akcapar is a social and cultural anthropologist and she has earned her PhD from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. She carried out research on history of Turkish Immigration to the US and skilled migration. Her current project deals with comparative analysis of migration flows from Mexico and Turkey and Islam in the West. She is an adjunct professor at Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University and visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of International Migration. Before coming to the US, she worked as a volunteer in several Turkish immigrant women’s associations in Europe, particularly in Belgium and in Germany, for the integration and emancipation of immigrant women. Apart from a number of articles in English and French, she also co-authored a working paper sponsored by the International Organization of Labor on migrants working in the informal sector in Turkey. Her research interests include Muslims in Western Europe and the US, problems of integration, the role of religion in international migration, forced migrants and transnationalism.
Jonathan Laurence is an assistant professor in the political science department at Boston College and an affiliated scholar at the Center on the US and Europe at the Brookings Institution (Washington, DC). Laurence is currently at work on a book about religious accommodation and political integration in modern Europe. His first book, Integrating Islam (co-authored with Justin Vaisse), was published by Brookings Press (2006). Laurence is author of the recent report on Muslims in Germany for the International Crisis Group (March 2007) and a review essay on Tariq Ramadan in the May/June 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs. He has also written policy reports for the Migration Policy Institute, the Bertelsmann Stiftung, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Center on the US and Europe at the Brookings Institution. Laurence received a Ph.D.(2006) and M.A. (2003) from
Mounir Azzaoui co-founder of the “Working Group on Green Muslims” in the Green Party of North Rhine-Westphalia in 2007. Currently, he is also a member of the working group “Religious Issues and the German Understanding of Constitution” at the German Conference on Islam (DIK) at the Federal Ministry of the Interior. From 2001-2006 he was the spokesman for the Central Council of Muslims in Germany (ZMD). Between 2005-2006 he was a member of the working group “Measures to Create Confidence” between security agencies and Muslim communities in cooperation with the Federal Criminal Investigation Office (Bundeskriminalamt) and Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz). Mr. Azzaoui studied political science in Aachen. He specialized in the incorporation of Islamic organizations into the German laws on State and Church and is currently preparing his Ph.D. thesis about “National Muslim Lobby Organizations in the USA.”
Jytte Klausen is a Professor of Comparative Politics at Brandeis University. She is the recipient of a Carnegie Scholars Award in 2007, and was a Bosch Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2004. During the academic year 2003-04 she was a British Academy Visiting Professor at Nuffield College, Oxford University. Klausen has published widely on the topic of muslims in
Almut Wieland-Karimi is the Executive Director of the Washington Office of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. Dr. Wieland-Karimi joined the FES Washington in February 2006 as the Foundation’s Representative to the U.S. and Canada. Between 2002 and 2005, she was Head of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Kabul, Afghanistan. She has served in the Foundation’s Middle East Department in Berlin and the Asia Department in Bonn, following a year as Project Assistant in the FES Buenos Aires Office in Argentina. Focusing on the political role of religious leaders in the Afghanistan conflict, she received her Ph.D. from the Humboldt University Berlin in 1997. From 1995 to 1996, she worked as a Research Associate at the Center for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin. She studied Middle Eastern and Oriental Studies in Bonn and Cairo and graduated from the University of Bonn in 1992 with a thesis on religious movements in Egypt.
Rapaporte Treasure Hall, Goldfarb Library
October 10, 2007 from 2:00 - 5:00 pm
Jewish-German Dialogue
Lecture with author Bill Niven: Representing the Fate of Jews at Buchenwald: The Case of Stefan Jerzy Zweig in the Jewish-German Dialogue Series.
For its leaders, the German Democratic Republic was founded on the legacy of communist resistance to Nazism. They laid particular emphasis on events at Buchenwald, where communist-led prisoners threw off the fascist yoke in a heroic act of self-liberation. A key strand in the Buchenwald narrative was the tale of the rescue by communist prisoners of a three-year-old Jewish prisoner, Stefan Jerzy Zweig. His story became a focus for the country's celebration of its antifascist past. Bill Niven sets out to establish Zweig's real story: what actually happened to him in Buchenwald, why was he protected, and at what price? (There is evidence that a Sinto boy was sent to Auschwitz in Zweig's place, perhaps due to the influence of communist prisoners, evidence that was repressed in the GDR). Niven then explores how Zweig's story was presented in East Germany and what that reveals about the country's understanding of the Nazi past and the Holocaust. Finally, he examines the postunification reception of the rescue story, in which the GDR's deployment of it has come in for heavy - and often, once again, politicized - criticism.
Niven is Professor of Contemporary German History at the Nottingham Trent University in England. His books include The Reception of Friedrich Hebbel in the Era of National Socialism (1984); (with J.K.A. Thomaneck) Dividing and Uniting Germany (2000); The Role of the Holocaust in the Propaganda War between East and West Germany (work in preparation). Among the books he has edited are (with Jim Jordan) Politics and Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany (2003) and Germans as Victims (2006).
Rapaporte Treasure Hall, Goldfarb Library
October 11, 2007 from 5:30 - 8:00 pm
Safety and Security: A Symposium
Safety and security are pressing issues in the contemporary world. In areas from the environment to food safety, from the threats, real and imagined, of terrorist attacks to safety in cities, public spaces, and at the borders, from the age of AIDS to Big Brother watching, overhearing, and recording our every move, the rhetoric of and about safety is ubiquitous. Astonishing to some, this is a shared rhetoric imposed on all of us, and usually, it is said, for our own good. How does this rhetoric call to individual subjects? What roles do political agencies of various sorts play in reshaping our lives?
How does the post-modern subject interact with others in a world that often seems to have gone beyond the human, where we are always plugged in, where we can never turn off the machines? The topics in this program address issues of safety as diverse as the plumbing and metro systems of Mexico City, various terrorist attacks, warning systems, responses, and public discourses, safe speech in a public space, and the rhetoric of 'homeland security.'
CGES is hosting a special symposium on Safety: Speaking Safety and Security with the following panelists and topics:
David Bell (Duke University) - Bunker MentalitiesRebecca Biron (Dartmouth) - Safe Passage: Mexico City
Beth Diamond (University of Michigan) - Safe Speech: Instigating Dialogue in Public Space
Robert Harvey (SUNY-Stony Brook) - Safety's Sanity
James Mandrell (Brandeis University) - Madrid / New York / 11-M / 9-11: A Cross Cultural Rhetoric
Lawrence R. Schehr (University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign) - Mineshaft Gap: Vigipirate and the Subject of Terror
Rapaporte Treasure Hall, Goldfarb Library
October 12, 2007 from 1:00 - 5:00 pm
The Threepenny Opera
Brandeis Theater Company performs Berthold Brecht's Threepenny Opera.
Brandeis Theater Company, Laurie Theater
October 11-21, 2007
Events Spring 2007
CGES 10th Anniversary Events
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JOSCHKA FISCHER at Brandeis: 
"We need a modern, European, Islam."
Using a recent appearance at Brandeis to deliver a sweeping critique of current U.S. foreign policy, former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer called on the United States to engage Syria and Iran, and to lead a reinvigoration of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
Why? Because, Fischer told about 200 students and faculty, at present ``America has only bad options'' in Iraq, and must try to make progress on other fronts to keep the Middle East from spinning disastrously out of control. His speech was cosponsored by the Center for German and European Studies and the International and Global Studies Program at Brandeis, with support from the Goethe Institut Boston.
All of his reasons for withholding German support of the U.S. invasion of Iraq – Why now? How will you get out? What about Iran? – have proved well founded, Fischer said, ``but it is very bitter to be right. We will all pay the price'' of a destabilized Middle East.
Peace between Israelis and Palestinians ``is not a dream,'' he said, pointing to the recently initiated unity government of Northern Ireland and claiming some credit for the European Union for making it possible. Due to EU investments, Ireland now is the second most-prosperous nation in Europe, he said, and this prosperity was an important element in creating the environment for peace.
``There is nobody better at peaceful regime change than the Europeans,'' Fischer said, but current leadership both among Israelis and Palestinians will be too weak to move forward without USA leadership in negotiating a security regime.
Arab and European nations alike will be disposed to cooperate with a U.S. initiative, he said, because both understand that ``the nuclear program of Iran is serious,'' and has very deep and broad support among in the Iranian public.
If Western policies in the Middle East continue in the current direction, Fischer said, ``in a few years we will face terrible challenges – more terrible than in the past.''
The popular former foreign minister, a visiting professor at Princeton University, noted that while the Middle East had strategic significance for the United States, for Europe it "defines our complicated neighborhood.’’
Overcoming "blocked modernization" in the Arab world would be "the biggest victory against terrorism," Fischer asserted. He called fears that Muslim migrants could "turn Europe into a Muslim continent" overblown, and stressed instead the importance of a encouraging a modern European Islam, the emergence of which he said he could already observe in Germany: ``The overwhelming majority of Muslim immigrants are becoming an important part of German culture, as writers, lawyers, professors, actors, and businessmen."
Fischer said the European Union is in danger of making a fundamental mistake by rejecting a formal agreement with Turkey, arguing that ``Turkey is key’’ to positive developments in the Middle East. He said a close affiliation with Turkey is in the best interest of Europe's long-term security.
Prior to his main, May 8, lecture in front of an audience of almost 2007, Fischer j
oined a conversation with about 20 German-speaking faculty and students on campus. Asked whether his year at Princeton had changed his image of America, he acknowledged that he owed much of his political upbringing "to Bob Dylan and the American civil rights movement," and expressed hope that the United States would once again become a true leader and spearhead the fight for economic development, social justice, and environmental sustainability around the world.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
6 pm, in Feldberg Lounge, Hassenfeld Conference Center
Rabbis for the Renaissance of German Jewish Life - The Abraham Geiger College ~ a talk by Dr. Walther Homolka ~
Dr. Walther Homolka is the Principal of the Abraham Geiger College at Potsdam University, Germany - the first German rabbinical seminary since the Shoa. He holds a PhD from Kings College London and is Chairman of the Leo Baeck Foundation and an Executive Board member of the World Union for Progressive Judaism. President Jacques Ghirac admitted him to the French Legion of Honor in 2004.