Wednesday 22nd of April 2026, 12–14, Fabianinkatu 24 A, 5th floor, room 532. Coffee and snacks will be served –
AmericaIsrael: Zionism, Judaism, and the Politics of Religious Dissent in the Contemporary United States
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Northwestern University
Drawing on Hurd’s new book Heaven Has a Wall, this lecture excavates and explores a cultural, religious and political consensus that appears to unite the US and Israel as if they were one supra-national state: “AmericaIsrael.” The political, religious, cultural, and commercial investments that sustain this consensus lend themselves to an eschatological American foreign policy reflecting not only Zionist religious and political ideals but also a wide spectrum of US nationalist fantasies. AmericaIsrael banks on a historical, religious, eschatological, topographical, and commercial fascination with the Holy Land among many Americans which predates 1948 and encompasses and exceeds Christian and Jewish Zionisms. This suspension of the US border with Israel is also bound up with the suspension of the border between Zionism and Judaism, such that to be or become American is to be or become a Zionist. In recent months and years, however, this consensus has begun to crumble.
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Professor of Political Science. She studies the politics of religion in U.S. foreign and immigration policy, the global politics of secularism and religious freedom, religion, politics, and American borders, the US and the Middle East, and the intersections of political theory and political theology. She co-directs the Global Religion & Politics Research Group, is a core faculty member in the MENA Studies program, and is a member of the French Interdisciplinary Group’s Sciences Po Partnership Advisory Committee.