Canceled | West Germany and Israel: Foreign Relations, Domestic Politics, and the Cold War, 1965-1974

Note: This event has been canceled. It will be included in the 2020-2021 NCGS program.

By the late 1960s, West Germany and Israel were moving in almost opposite diplomatic directions in a political environment dominated by the Cold War. The Federal Republic launched ambitious policies to reconcile with its Iron Curtain neighbors, expand its influence in the Arab world, and promote West European interests vis-à-vis the United States. By contrast, Israel, unable to obtain peace with the Arabs after its 1967 military victory and threatened by Palestinian terrorism, became increasingly dependent upon the United States, estranged from the USSR and Western Europe, and isolated from the Third World. Nonetheless, the two countries remained connected by shared security concerns, personal bonds, and recurrent evocations of the German-Jewish past. Drawing upon newly-available sources, the talk will discuss the underlying issues that shaped these two countries’ fraught relationship and set their foreign and domestic policies in a global context.

Carole Fink is Humanities Distinguished Professor of History Emerita at The Ohio State University. She has recently published West Germany and Israel: Foreign Relations, Domestic Politics, and the Cold War, 1965-1974 (2019) and the second edition of Cold War: An International History (2017). Two earlier books – Defending the Rights of Others (2004) and The Genoa Conference of 1922 (1984) – received the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association and her biography of Marc Bloch has been translated into six languages.

Moderator: Malachi Hacohen | Duke University, Department of History

In cooperation with the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies and the Duke Center for Jewish Studies. This event is part of the North Carolina German Studies Workshop and Seminar Series.

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