TAU Unbound - Episode #47: Sexual violence against women as a weapon of war (by Hamas and beyond)

In this special episode, Ido Aharoni engages in a conversation with Prof. Tamar Herzig about the mass rape of women, and the mutilation of their bodies, during the October 7th atrocities. Prof. Herzig describes herself as a feminist historian and is shocked by the silence of some of her academic colleagues globally. She is the Konrad Adenauer Professor of Comparative European History at Tel Aviv University. She currently serves as Vice Dean for Research of the Faculty of Humanities, as Vice Chairperson of the Historical Society of Israel, and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Renaissance Society of America. In 2014-2021, she served as Director of Tel Aviv University's Morris E. Curiel Institute for European Studies. Her article “Slavery and Interethnic Sexual Violence: A Multiple Perpetrator Rape in Seventeenth-Century Livorno” (American Historical Review 127:1) won the 2022 Best Article Award of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender, and was awarded the Mediterranean Seminar’s Article of the Month Award for July 2022. In 2021, she was awarded the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies’ Michael Bruno Memorial Award for groundbreaking research, for her contribution to the study of premodern history and especially of the Italian Renaissance. In 2020 she won the American Historical Association's Rosenberg Prize and later on was awarded Honorable Mention of the Renaissance Society of America's Gordan Book Prize in Renaissance Studies (2021) for her book A Convert’s Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy. (Harvard University Press, 2019; Hebrew Translation: Magnes Press, 2023; Italian translation; Viella, 2023). For her work on religious conversion in early modern Italy, she also won the Kadar Award for Outstanding Research in 2019.

 

00:00 - Intro

01:55 - Italian history

02:19 - The dark side of the Renaissance

03:48 - Slave women, sexual violence, gang rape

05:26 - Livorno community Italy

08:20 - Crimes against Jews

12:00 - Rape of women as a weapon of war

15:00 - Rape as a strategy

15:00 - Rape and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

18:00 - Rape by Hamas and ISIS

20:00 - Global denial campaign of rape of Israeli women

21:00 - The silence of the leaders in the #Metoo movement

22:06 - The collapse of feminism

25:48 - Rape as slow murder

30:00 - Israeli rapes are not sexual impulses

Lowy International School TAU: https://international.tau.ac.il