Teaching

I teach at the Institute of Political Studies, Charles University. My courses are built on disagreement: each class pairs readings that approach the same problem differently. Students reconstruct the arguments fairly, work out where the disagreement really lies, and ask what evidence would settle it. The aim is to get better at distinguishing claims from evidence, and at talking to each other rather than past each other.

Theories of Antisemitism

From the premodern period to the present: what antisemitism is, how it relates to anti-Judaism and racism, how conspiracy theories work, how Holocaust memory has reshaped the debate, and where the boundaries lie between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. The course begins and ends with one question: how useful is “antisemitism” as an analytical category?

The Jews of Central Europe

Transformations in the political, social, and cultural life of Central European Jewry from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century: traditional Jewish society, enlightenment, emancipation, racial antisemitism, Jewish nationalism and Zionism, the Holocaust, and the rebirth of Jewish life after 1945.

Race and Global Politics

How racial and ethnic categories are made, when identities become politically salient, how they shape political preferences and violence, and how they travel across borders through colonialism, intervention, migration, and diaspora. Global and comparative, across Europe, North America, Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The Politics of Regret

Past injustices as central to contemporary world politics: guilt, trauma, and responsibility; truth commissions, trials, and lustrations; official and unofficial apologies. Drawing on examples from Europe and North America, the course asks how the past is constructed to serve present causes, and why it matters now.

I always welcome inquiries from students interested in these or related subjects, and I regularly seek research assistants from among my students.