Barry Trachtenberg teaches Jewish History at Wake Forest University and is the author, most recently, of The United States and the Nazi Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is member of the Academic Advisory Board of Jewish Voice for Peace.
Trachtenberg recently authored the Mondoweiss article, “The New Kherem, or ‘Barry Trachtenberg Does Not Represent Us!’: On speaking for and against Jewish self-interests.” Trachtenberg describes how Jewish critics of Israel and Zionism are being attacked in a new way. The old strategy was to label Jews who support Palestinian freedom as “self-hating,” while the new strategy attempts to silence them through denunciations in the press, assaults on academic freedom, financial strangleholds, and a new form of kherem, Yiddish and Hebrew for “excommunication”.
