How Zionist Youth Movement Saved My Life
William Deresiewicz & Pinchas Giller discuss Zionist youth movements’ impact on American Judaism and Israel’s changing political landscape.
“It’s hard to explain to people today,” said Bernard Avishai not long ago, “how cool it was to be a Zionist in 1968.” AJU Public Fellow and best-selling author William Deresiewicz will reflect on his formative years in Young Judaea, a progressive Zionist youth movement, in the 1970s and 80s, and on the movement more broadly. What was it, what did it mean, and how did it shape him and his peers? What place did aliyah-oriented Zionism have within American Judaism, and in the lives of young American Jews, in the years after the Six-Day War? What has become of the dreams that animated the left-leaning Zionist youth movements in the decades since, as Israel has drifted to the right? Bill will be joined in conversation by Prof. Pinchas Giller, Chair of Jewish Studies at AJU and Bill’s first merakez at Tel Yehudah, Young Judaea’s national summer camp.
William Deresiewicz is an essayist, critic, and speaker, renowned for his best-seller Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. The author of more than 300 essays and reviews, he has earned awards like the Hiett Prize in the Humanities and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. His work appears in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and more. He has been a guest on The Colbert Report and The New Yorker Radio Hour.
Rabbi Pinchas Giller was ordained at Yeshiva University and received his PhD from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. His has written four scholarly works on Kabbalah and its central work, the Zohar. Rabbi Giller is on the faculty of the Ziegler Rabbinical School and is the head of the Jewish Studies department at the American Jewish University.
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