Avrum Burg: Israel Learned from the Germans, the Church Learned from Judaism

Avrum Burg: Israel Learned from the Germans, the Church Learned from Judaism: Two Charismas of Collectives Lecture at the conference on "Charisma", June 27, 2026 This talk explores Israel as a case study in two forms of charisma: the charisma of the powerless and the charisma of sovereign power. The argument is that Jewish history once produced a charisma rooted in vulnerability, intellectual intensity, and moral imagination, while statehood transformed charisma into something increasingly tied to force and domination. Part reflection, part political meditation, the lecture asks what happens when a people shaped by oppression begins to adopt the symbolic language and instincts of its own oppressors. Avrum Burg is an Israeli author and politician. He was advisor to prime minister Shimon Peres, a member of the Knesset and Speaker of the Knesset from 1999 to 2003, and Chairman of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization. Since retiring from politics he has become an international bestselling author. In 2007, Burg published a book entitled The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise From Its Ashes in which he argued that Israeli society has become violent as a consequence of the continuing trauma over the Holocaust. In 2021, Burg appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court to have the Interior Ministry erase from its records that his nationality is Jewish, in response to the 2018 Jewish Nation State Law which, in his view, codified “built in discrimination”.