Service and Speaker Fred Rosenbaum

Please join us for Shabbat Service with Rabbi Aron and Lay Cantor Robert Bergman and the choir. Speaker Fred Rosenbaum will an explore the Origins of the Palestinian Refugee Problem.

What happened in 1948? In the same months in which Israel came into existence, the large majority of Palestinian Arabs found themselves in exile. Early on, each side put forth its own version of the momentous demographic shift that resulted in the relocation of 700,000 Arabs.

The Zionist narrative held that the Palestinians fled in response to a radio broadcast from the surrounding Arab countries, urging them to leave their towns and villages. They would be able to return after five invading Arab armies defeated Israel, and indeed the Arabs attacked on May 15, 1948. The Palestinian story is equally clear-cut. They claim that they were brutally expelled from their homes by the Jews – one of the greatest injustices in the 20th century.

In the past two decades, this topic has attracted leading researchers in Israel, the Arab states, and throughout the world. This lecture will draw upon that scholarship to find the roots of the Palestinian refugee crisis.

About the speaker:
Fred Rosenbaum, an award–winning author, teacher, and educator, is the Founding Director of Lehrhaus Judaica. He has been a faculty member at the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, where he taught a course on the Holocaust to Christian seminarians. He has lectured widely in the United States and abroad – and has led study tours to Eastern and Western Europe, Israel and Jordan, Cuba and New York.

Mr. Rosenbaum is the author of six books on modern Jewish history, most recently, Cosmopolitans:A Social and Intellectual History of the Jews of San Francisco.

Relevant website link: http://www.lehrhaus.org/about/.

Related reading: The Much Too Promised Land, by Aaron David Miller, The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem by Benny Morris.

Free and open to the public.