JERUSALEM ON THE AMSTEL - BOOK LAUNCH

book event with author Lipika Pelham and Professor
Ben Kaplan
The story of the Iberian New Christians-turned-Jews settling in
Amsterdam carries a timely relevance in the modern world where
in recent decades a great many people have been displaced from
former Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Syria to Iraq to Libya to sub-
Saharan Africa.
As new exoduses continue to happen in an atmosphere of war in
the Middle East and elsewhere, refugees arriving from these parts
try to redefine their identity in their new environments. This has
led to a new wave of hate speech, widespread anti-immigration
sentiment among Europeans and paradoxically also among the
old immigrants. Displacement, insecurity, ethnic and identity
politics have been the zeitgeist of
the twenty-first century.
The author Lipika Pelham and
professor Ben Kaplan will discuss in
this context, the idea of tolerance,
and whether or not it can be
achieved by law. The sixteenth
century Dutch legal act to support
religious and ethnic tolerance
collapsed tragically during WWII
leading to the Dutch Holocaust.
How do we instil acceptance,
organically, into today’s identity