Historian Matusow to present next Scientia lecture Jan. 29

Allen Matusow

Allen Matusow, academic affairs director at the Baker Institute for Public Policy and the William Gaines Twyman Professor of History, will present the Bochner Lecture in this year’s Scientia lecture series. His talk, “Zionism, America and the Creation of the State of Israel,” will be at 7 p.m. Jan. 29 in McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall.

This year’s Scientia theme is the power of ideas. The idea central to Matusow’s lecture is Zionism, an idea so powerful that it overcame great odds to achieve its purpose — the creation of a Jewish state. According to Matusow, the United States contributed to this result by what it did not do for European Jewry during the Jewish people’s most tragic hour and what it did do for Israel at that nation’s birth in 1948. Knowledge of this history is the essential prerequisite for understanding the crisis that convulses the Middle East to this day.

The event is free and open to the public.

Scientia is an institute of Rice University faculty founded in 1981 by the mathematician and historian of science Salomon Bochner. The lecture series provides an opportunity for scholarly discussion across disciplinary boundaries; its members and fellows come from a wide range of academic disciplines. For more information on Scientia, visit http://scientia.rice.edu.