We are delighted to announce our upcoming speaker event.   Professor Amir Eshel is visiting London this month and has kindly offered to talk to members of the Stanford Club .  Professor Eshel is a very interesting speaker -  this will be a popular event, so book early!

Beyond Land: What Will It take to Bring Reconciliation Between Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs?

We tend to think that the only obstacle for solving the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is the dispute over the same territory. While it is true that reaching an agreement about the future borders between Israel and a future Palestinian state is crucial, there is no guarantee that dividing the land would yield a lasting resolution of the hostilities.
 
What else will it take to begin reconciliation between the parties? This presentation will discuss how a meaningful exchange of ideas and views about the past and the possible future can help facilitate a lasting peace. It will also include Stanford's role in assisting Israelis and Palestinians in achieving peace.

Professor Eshel's research focuses include German culture, comparative literature, and German-Jewish history and culture from the Enlightenment to the present. He is working on a project about how modern societies and cultures view difficult past events and how a consciousness of the past enables them to develop civic norms and democracy. At Stanford, he has taught courses on German Jewish literature, literature of the Holocaust, modern German poetry, and contemporary Germany and Israel. He is the author of Zeit der Zäsur: Jüdische Lyriker im Angesicht der Shoah, a study of temporality, memory culture and the Shoah in the poetry of Jewish writers. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 1998, he taught at the Universitat Hamburg in Germany. In 2002, he received the Award for Distinguished Teaching from Stanford's dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences. He received an MA and PhD in German literature from the Universitat Hamburg.