Annual Inter Faith Lecture | Another Fateful Triangle: Jews, Muslims, Europe Seminar

In this talk, Elisabeth Becker invokes Stuart Hall's concept of a "fateful triangle", turning to the intersection of Jewish, Muslim, and European identities, specifically highlighting the ways in which Jewish-Muslim intersections shape European societies: both in terms of contemporary life and in terms of collective memory. Drawing from research in European metropoles, the narratives of Jewish and Muslim Europeans are placed at the centre of a distinct understanding of Europe as made with, through, and by its ethnoreligious minorities, rather than (by setting itself) apart, as (post)Christian and secular, from them. Tracing such debates as those over religious rites (e.g. circumcision), religious representation in public life, and restitution of looted art and artefacts (both Nazi-era and colonial), it ultimately illuminates the agency of Jews and Muslims in (re)imagining and inhabiting Europe as dynamic space/place and idea.

This is a hybrid event, meaning you can attend in-person at Avenue Campus or online via Zoom.

About the Speaker

Elisabeth Becker is a Freigeist Fellow at the Max Weber Institute for Sociology, Heidelberg University. She is author of Mosques in the Metropolis: Incivility, Caste and Contention in Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2021), and has published extensively on religion, race and ethnicity, specifically focusing on Jewish and Muslim experiences in the context of Europe (e.g. in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Cultural Sociology and American Journal of Cultural Sociology). As a public scholar, she also runs Inscribing Plurality (a project that trains emerging Jewish and Muslim writers in Germany, supported by the Landecker Foundation) and writes for mainstream publications such as the The Washington Post, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Tablet Magazine. Email: elisabeth.becker-topkara@mwi.uni-heidelberg.de.