New York Desk

A political science professor at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer, who co-authored a Harvard paper on the “Israel Lobby” that ignited a furor when it was published in March, will participate in a debate tonight on whether the lobby exerts undue influence on American foreign policy.Also on stage at Cooper Union tonight will be a professor at Columbia University, Rashid Khalidi; a professor at New York University, Tony Judt; two former State Department officials, Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk; a former Israeli minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami; and a dean at Princeton University, Anne-Marie Slaughter. “My guess,” Mr. Judt said, “is that we’ll begin by focusing on the Mearsheimer paper and whether it opens up the ground of anti-Semitism, but I hope we’ll talk about whether America’s foreign policy in the Middle East is distorted by our relationship with Israel. I hope we can talk about that rather than just the Mearsheimer piece itself.”