'A Matter of Cognitive Dissonance?' Comparing some origins of anti-Jewish violence across time and space.' Event

Speaker information

Dr Mark Levene,Reader in History Though my background and teaching has been particularly in modern Jewish history, my major focus in the last decade has been in plotting and attempting to interpret the pattern of genocide in recent history. This has meant I've committed what for many historians are two cardinal sins - eschewing both the path of primary research and specialisation in a specific area study. The justification is that I'm trying to see the wood for the trees, or put more pedantically, a broader overview of historical development through the prism of a particularly disturbing but persistent by-product. I feel strongly that the phenomenon cannot be viewed as a series of isolated aberrations, but rather as evidence of a much more serious systemic dysfunction in the nature of western-led international society as it has emerged in the last two to three hundred years.