Scientific Meeting: Racism and Anti-Semitism: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Othering

1. Buy your ticket at nypsi.org. PLEASE NOTE: Ticket Registration is NOT the same as ZOOM registration.
2. One day prior: Complete ZOOM registration for webinar which you will receive by email from Sharon Weller. This step involves entering your name and email address. If you do not complete this, you will NOT receive link to webinar. PLS NOTE: ZOOM registration is separate from NYPSI website registration.
3. Click on email from Lois Oppenheim (host) which contains ZOOM link and password to “enter” the webinar.
4. Evaluation survey and CME/CE documentation will be emailed the day after the event.

The 1052nd Scientific Program Meeting:

“Racism and Anti-Semitism: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Othering”

The third in a series of three meetings devoted to the notion of conflict, both small-scale and large-scale, intra-institutional and inter-national.

Tuesday, December 14, 2021

8:00 pm – 10:00 pm (EST)

Panelists: Leon Hoffman, M.D. in conversation with Susannah Heschel, Ph.D. and J. Kameron Carter, Ph.D.

Why is racism so tenacious? Is anti-semitism a species of racism? Is racism a species of anti-Judaism? Are they entirely separate phenomena? This discussion will address the relationship between racism and anti-semitism, examining specific examples from history and how historical, racial, religious, and psychoanalytic scholarship can offer insight into both phenomena. Professor Heschel will draw from her historical scholarship on the Nazi era to explore the slippery nature of racism, its ability to alter its manifestations with ease and hide behind various disavowals while facilitating the racialization of political conflict, social institutions, and religious thought. Professor Carter will consider racial oppression as a theological construct transferred to the political institutions of society. How and which psychoanalytic ideas help us to understand the tenacious persistence of these maladaptive dichotomies of purity and defilement will be the focus of the meeting.   

2 Contact Hours. 2 CME/ CE credits offered.

Susannah Heschel, Ph.D. is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor and chair of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish and Protestant religious thought in Germany during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her books include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus; The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany; Jüdischer Islam: Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung; The Muslim Reception of European Orientalism (coedited); and forthcoming with Sarah Imhoff, Jewish Studies and the Woman Question.  A Guggenheim Fellow, she has received five honorary doctorates and grants from the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, National Humanities Center and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

J. Kameron Carter, Ph.D. is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He also directs, with Winnifred Sullivan, IU’s Center for Religion and the Human and is on the advisory board of IU’s Center for Theoretical Inquiry. Professor Carter’s work focuses on the co-constituting catastrophes of race, (settler) colonialism, and environmental crises as matters of political theology. Carter is author of Race: A Theological Account (Oxford UP, 2008) and The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song (Duke UP, forthcoming, 2022). He has also just completed a book manuscript titled, The Religion of Whiteness: An Apocalyptic Lyric, which is with Yale UP. This last book inaugurates Carter’s “Mystic Song” trilogy, which advances an understanding of Blackness as released from racial category and thus as worldless and black religion as practices of worldlessness in the name of entangled earthiness. Positively put, Carter’s “Mystic Song” trilogy offers a poetics that entails a (black) theory of the earth.

Leon Hoffman, M.D., Psychiatrist and Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist; Training and Supervising Analyst in adult, child, and adolescent analysis, co-Director, Pacella Research Center at NYPSI (New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute); faculty Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Chief Psychiatrist/Psychoanalyst, West End Day School in NYC. He is co-author of Manual for Regulation-Focused Psychotherapy for Children with Externalizing Behaviors (RFP-C): A Psychodynamic Approach. A Randomized Clinical Trial (RCT) which demonstrated the effectiveness of the approach, has been published in Psychotherapy Research. The manual has also been translated into Italian. Hoffman’s publications include collaboration with different colleagues. He has written on the application of linguistic measures to the evaluation of psychotherapy and psychoanalytic sessions; studied the impact of teletherapy during the COVID-19 pandemic; and has written theoretical and clinical papers, papers discussing social problems, book reviews, and book essays, including “Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Populism” in Contemporary Psychoanalysis in 2018 and “The evolution of racism in the Western world: addressing fear of the other” published in 2021 in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Educational Objectives: Upon completion of this activity participants should be able to,

 within the context of psychoanalytic theories and concepts, 

1. describe the major historical manifestations of anti-semitism, new scholarly methods for examining antisemitism and its emotional impact, and problems associated with using “anti-semitism” as a label for social or political phenomena
2. explain  how racism and anti-semitism interact and reinforce one another
3. describe the pervasiveness of the concept of purity versus defilement