Participant Biographies

Panelists

David Tse-Chien Pan is the Editor of Telos and Professor of German at the University of California-Irvine. He received his Ph.D. in 1995 from Columbia University and has taught at Washington University (St. Louis), Stanford University, and Penn State University. He is the author of Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism (University of Nebraska Press, 2001) and Sacrifice in the Modern World: On the Particularity and Generality of Nazi Myth (Northwestern University Press, 2012).

Olga Kirschbaum-Shirazki is an historian of Modern Europe by training, co-founder and editor of Tel Aviv Review of Books, a fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute, and Jewish educator in the fields of Jewish and world history, and interethnic and interreligious relations. Fluent in French, German, and Spanish, as well as Hebrew, she has translated academic works from French to English and brought together scholars and perspectives from these different cultural realms—including diaspora communities within them—in her work as an editor and educator. She has also contributed as a researcher and consultant to the work of a number of NGOs dedicated to intergroup and interreligious encounters. She is currently finishing a book on universal law in the Jewish tradition as an alternative to human rights.

Respondent

John M. Ellis is a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, chair of the California Association of Scholars, and the author of eleven books, the most recent of which is The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done. His other books about the reform of academia include Against Deconstruction (1989) and Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (1997).

Moderator and Host

Our panel’s moderator is Gabriel Noah Brahm (aka Gabi Abramovich). Brahm is Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel Initiative, Professor of English and World Literature at Northern Michigan University, and Visiting Researcher in Political Science at Tel Aviv University. A frequent contributor to The American Mind, Fathom, Perspectives on Political Science, Society, and Telos, he is co-editor, with Cary Nelson, of The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel (2014). He received his B.A. from UCLA and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @Brahmski.