Thursday, April 18, 2013 at 7:30 p.m.
Maud Mandel, Brown University
The Raoul Wallenberg Annual Program funded by Leon and Toby Cooperman
Trayes Hall, Douglass Campus Center - New location
(Parking deck behind Douglass Campus Center)
 
On  October 3, 2000, six Molotov cocktails were thrown at a synagogue in Villepinte in the northern outskirts of Paris, launching a wave of attacks against French Jewish institutions, property and individuals that continued intermittently throughout the decade.  Largely the work of Muslim youth from the country’s most disadvantaged sectors, the violence raised alarms over the state of Muslim/Jewish relations in contemporary France, fears that ebbed and flowed over the subsequent decade. This talk will explore the origins of this violence by tracing the way inter-ethnic political divisions emerged and consolidated, erasing memories of more varied inter-communal connections. 
 
Maud S. Mandel is Director of the Judaic Studies Program and Associate Professor of History at Brown University. She specializes in modern Jewish history and has focused particularly on the 20th-century French Jewish experience. She has written extensively on the impact of genocide on the reconstruction of community and on inter-ethnic relations. Her work has been marked by an on-going engagement with comparative historical methodology, and she has written extensively about Armenian and Muslim communities in France as well.

Her monograph, In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in Twentieth Century France, was published by Duke University Press in 2003. Her current book project, Muslims and Jews in France:  The Genealogy of a Conflict is under contract with Princeton University Press and has been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Philosophical Society. Her most recent article,"The War Comes Home: Muslim/Jewish Relations in Marseille during the 1991 Gulf War," appeared in the volume, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the Francophone World, was published by Routledge in 2009.

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