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Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth

  • Bohemian Benevolent & Literary Association 321 East 73rd Street New York, NY, 10021 United States (map)

Photo: Chuck Fishman

Historian Magda Teter will discuss blood libel, an anti-Jewish lie that emerged in the Middle Ages but became embedded in European Christian imagination later. The blood libel continues to have relevance today, as contemporary political cartoons and even deadly violence make clear. The talk will explore how a medieval anti-Jewish lie spread across Europe and continues to persist into the 21st century even in the US.

Free and open to the public. Suggested donation $15. Seats are limited, on first-come, first-served basis. RSVP through Eventbrite.


ABOUT

MAGDA TETER, Professor of History and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University, is the author of Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (Cambridge, 2006), Sinners on Trial (Harvard, 2011: a finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Prize), Blood Libel: On the Trail of An Antisemitic Myth (Harvard, 2020: National Jewish Book Award, The George L. Mosse Prize from the American Historical Association, and the Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society), most recently, Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism (Princeton, May 2023), and of articles in English, Hebrew, Italian, and Polish.

Teter has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the HF Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, the Cullman Center at the NYPL, and the NEH. She has served as the co-editor of the AJS Review and as the VP for Publications of the Association for Jewish Studies. Teter is currently the President of the American Academy for Jewish Research.


The event is organized by the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews with support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, Consulate General of the Czech Republic in New York, Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association and the Leo Baeck Institute.