January, 2023
Event Details
Online lecture Organized by Department of History, Philosophy and the Ancient World, Deree – The American College of Greece in collaboration with ISGAP - Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy Lecture Speaker: Dr.
Event Details
Online lecture
Organized by
Department of History, Philosophy and the Ancient World, Deree – The American College of Greece
in collaboration with
ISGAP – Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy
Lecture Speaker:
Dr. David Nussbaum, Ph.D., C. Psych.
Assistant Professor, University of Toronto Scarborough (retired)
ISGAP Senior Research Fellow
When: Thursday, January 19, 2023 | 14:10-15:10
Where: You may join the event online (Zoom) here
The event is free and open to the public.
About the lecture
Throughout Jewish history, irrational, intense and disproportionate hatred of the Jewish People and its violent aftermath have presented existential threats to Jewish communities around the world. Contemporary antisemitism focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on fabricated allegations intending to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish State and by extension, vilify Jews and others anywhere who support Israel’s existence. Commensurate with the continuity and magnitude of this extreme prejudice and behavior, there is an extensive literature on the history and historical analyses of the phenomenon, but a relative lack of rigorous attempts to understand underlying psychological dimensions of the groups and individuals who actualize antisemitism. Specifically, existing treatments do not provide concurrent analyses of different types of antisemitism, and do not address how individuals occupying different positions within antisemitic group hierarchies differ with respect to cognitive, emotional, motivational, and perceptual modalities in general and their interactive relationships to antisemitism.
This talk will briefly outline different types of human information processing, hierarchical organizational structures, and aggression types. These building blocks will be used to identify and differentiate distinct types of antisemitism, the psychology of individuals occupying different positions in antisemitic hierarchies from the complex (e.g., national) to the simple (e.g., lone wolves), and suggest strategies for effectively countering the multifaceted array of antisemitic organizations and individuals aligned against the Jewish People by effective messaging and activities. Proposed empirical studies to validate and refine these ideas will be described.
Bio of the Speaker
Dr. David Nussbaum, Ph. D., C. Psych.
Assistant Professor, University of Toronto Scarborough (retired); ISGAP Senior Research Fellow
Prof. Nussbaum was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) between 2005 and 2013. Prior to his position at UTSC, he was an Adjunct Professor at York University from 1984 to 2004. More recently from 2011 through 2020, Prof. Nussbaum held a series of renewed Guest (Visiting) Professorships at the China University of Political Science and Law, Beijing, China. Originally setting out to be a clinical psychologist, he instead followed a radically different approach to understanding behavior that was afforded by a third-year undergraduate course entitled “Molecular Psychobiology”. Following graduate school, he retrained as a clinician and worked within forensic settings doing both clinical work and research. Prof. Nussbaum was continuously struck by the absence of behavioral neuroscience in the forensic area and conducted both his clinical practice and empirical research within a behavioral neuroscience framework. An elected Fellow of both the Canadian (CPA) and American Psychological Associations, he was awarded Professor of the Year (Psychology) at UTSC in 2011. He served as Chair of the CPA Sections on Criminal Justice (7 years), Psychopharmacology (23 years), and Extremism and Terrorism (6 years.) Prof. Nussbaum has also served as a Psychology Member of the Ontario Review Board since 1997. He has lectured internationally including Belgium, China, Finland, Germany, Japan, Israel, Kenya, Sweden, and the United States. His research interests span Behavioral Neuroscience, Epistemology of Psychology, Violent Risk Prediction and Extremism & Terrorism. He has published 45 peer reviewed papers, and delivered over 125 peer-reviewed talks at professional and scientific meetings and conferences.
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