We are really delighted that Dr Brian Klug will be reading from and talking about his latest book, Words of Fire: Selected Essays by Ahad Ha’am, on 14 February at Hashomer House. The talk is called Ahad Ha’am and the Jewish Future.
- Find out more about Ahad Ha’am in this online biography and read Ahad Ha’am’s 1897 essay “The Jewish State and Jewish Problem”.
- Below is more information about Brian and his amazing range of activities and writings!
Brian Klug has degrees in Philosophy from the University of London and a PhD in Social Thought from the University of Chicago.
He is Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St. Benet’s Hall, Oxford; member of the faculty of philosophy at the University of Oxford; Honorary Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton; and Fellow of the College of Arts & Sciences, Saint Xavier University, Chicago, where for several years he was Chair of the Department of Philosophy.
Ahad Ha’am 1856-1927
He has published extensively on Jewish identity, antisemitism, Islamophobia, race and related topics. His latest book, Words of Fire: Selected Essays of Ahad Ha’am (Notting Hill Editions), was published in September 2015. Other books include Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life (2011) and Offence: The Jewish Case (2009). He has co-edited several books, among them (with Jacqueline Rose, Barbara Rosenbaum and Anne Karpf) A Time To Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity (2008). Recent chapters in books include ‘Moses: The Significant Other’, in Dynamics of Difference: Christianity and Alterity (2015), ‘Implicit Islamophobia? Behind the “Muscular Liberalism” of the British Prime Minister’ in Instances of Islamophobia: Demonizing the Muslim “Other” (2015) and ‘Interrogating “New Antisemitism”‘, in Racialization and Religion: Race, Culture and Difference in the Study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia (2014).
His writing has appeared in numerous print journals and periodicals, including AJS Perspectives (Association for Jewish Studies, US), Aufbau, Blätter für Deutsche und Internationale Politik, Catalyst (Commission for Racial Equality), Emel, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Ethnicities, Foreign Policy, Israel & Palästina, Jewish Chronicle, Jewish Currents, Jewish Quarterly, Jewish Renaissance, Jewish Socialist, Jewish Year Book (UK), Journal of Jewish Studies, Journal of Palestine Studies, Manna, Patterns of Prejudice, Peace and Change, Political Quarterly, ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies, Red Pepper, Searchlight, Studies in Higher Education, Tachles, Tel Aviv Yearbook for German History, The Middle East in London (SOAS), The Nation, Think (Royal Institute of Philosophy, London), as well as The Guardian and newspapers in Austria, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. Forthcoming articles will appear in European Judaism, French Cultural Studies and The International Journal of Public Theology. Other articles have appeared on numerous websites, including CritCom (Council for European Studies, Columbia University), Mondoweiss and Open Democracy.
Among the subjects he has taught at Oxford are tutorial courses on ‘Philosophy after Auschwitz: Ethics and Modernity in the Light of the Nazi Holocaust’, ‘Zion and Zionism: Conceptions of Jewish Identity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’ and ‘Thinking and Acting: An Introduction to Hannah Arendt’. As Lecturer in Humanities at the University of Southampton, he taught a seminar course on the British mandate period in Palestine.
He was a co-founder of Independent Jewish Voices and is currently a participant in the ongoing project ‘Arab-Jewish Engagement’, which meets twice a year in Vienna under the auspices of the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue, an Austrian think tank.
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