February 4, 2014
Co-sponsored with the Columbia University Center for Israel & Jewish Studies
Lecturer: Eran Rolnik, MD, PhD
Discussant: Anne Hoffman PhD

Dr. Rolnik, a psychoanalyst and historian at Tel Aviv University and the Max Eitingon Institute for Psychoanalysis and author of Freud in Zion: Psychoanalysis and the Making of the Modern Jewish Identity, tells the story of psychoanalysis coming to Jewish Palestine/Israel. He explores the encounter between psychoanalysis, Judaism, modern Hebrew culture and the Zionist revolution in a unique political and cultural context of war, immigration, ethnic tensions, colonial rule and nation-making. Based on previously unpublished documents, including unpublished letters by Freud, his story integrates intellectual and social history to provide a moving account of how psychoanalysis permeated popular and intellectual discourse in the emerging Jewish state.