Ivan Kalmar

Soon after he was born in Prague, his family moved to Komárno, and later to Bratislava. When he was seventeen, he left what was then Czechoslovakia, and eventually arrived in the United States. Kalmar's family settled down in Philadelphia.

Kalmar attended The University of Pennsylvania. There he received his undergraduate degree. Moving to Toronto during the Vietnam War, he took up study at The University of Toronto, where he received both a master's degree and a PhD in anthropology.

Kalmar is currently a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.[1] He is also involved with first-year undergraduate education at Victoria College, including the Vic One Program, where he holds the title of Hon. Newton W. Rowell Professor. In his recent research, the focus has been on western Christian views of Jews and Muslims. Currently, Kalmar is working on illiberalism and populism in the eastern, formerly communist-ruled areas of the European Union.[2]

Some of the following texts are available online via the University of Toronto Library.

Books

• The Trotskys, Freuds, and Woody Allens: Portrait of a Culture. New York: Viking Press, 1994.
• Orientalism and the Jews. Ed. by Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2005.
• Early Orientalism: Imagined Islam and the Notion of Sublime Power. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. ISBN 9780203154809

Journal articles and book chapters

• "The Origins of the `Spanish Synagogue' of Prague." Judaica Bohemiae 35 (1999): 158-209.
• "Moorish Style: Orientalism, the Jews, and Synagogue Architecture." Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society 7.3 (2001): 68-100.
• "I Did Not Know You Were Jewish … and Other Things Not to Say When You Find Out." Pam Downe and Lesley Biggs eds., Women's & Gender Studies Reader. Black Point, NS: Fernwood, 2005.
• "The Future of `Tribal Man’ in the Electronic Age," Marshall McLuhan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory. Ed. Gary Genosko. New York: Routledge, 2005.
• "Benjamin Disraeli: Romantic Orientalist." Comparative Studies in History and Society 47.2 (2005):348-371.
• "Antisemitism and Islamophobia: The Formation of a Secret," Human Architecture 7 (Spring 2009)
• "Is Islam Anti-Semitic?" Literary Review of Canada (March 2011)
• "Arabizing the Bible: Racial Supersessionism in Nineteenth Century Christian Art and Biblical Criticism" in Ian Netton, ed. Orientalism Revisited. London and New York: Routledge, 2012, 176-186.
• "Race by Grace:Race and Religion, the Secular State, and the Construction of ‘Jew’ and ‘Arab," in Efraim Sicher, Jews Color Race: Rethinking Jewish Identities. London: Berghahn Press, 2013, 482-509.
• “Islamophobia in Germany: East/West,” Special Issue of The Journal of Contemporary Studies, guest edited with Nitzan Shoshan.
• “Islamophobia in the East of the European Union,” Special Issue of Patterns of Prejudice (2018), guest editor.