In his ground-breaking book, Year Zero, Professor Hillel Cohen, Visiting Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, examines the violent riots that took place in Palestine in 1929, with Arab attacks on Jews and Jewish attacks on Arab. Arguing that the events of that year and – more importantly – the memory of the violence and the political uses of that memory, by Jews and Arabs, constitute a turning point in the history of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, with consequences that linger to this day.

Professor Cohen’s lecture will ask: What does it mean to write a book about those events while living and teaching in the midst of the ongoing conflict, as a professor of Middle East Studies at an Israeli university with a specialization in the history of Zionism and the history of Palestinians? How do the raging political events of the contemporary moment affect the work of the historian?