Gaza in Context: A Collaborative Teach-In Series — Session 05

Antisemitism & Anti-Zionism

Featuring: 
Adam Horowitz
Sherene Seikaly
John Reynolds
Shira Robinson

Moderator:
Bassam Haddad

10 November 2023
8:00 AM PST | 11:00 AM EST | 6:00 PM Palestine

Teach-In Session 05

This teach-in will feature a discussion on antisemitism and anti-Zionism and how the two have been conflated, especially in recent weeks in light of the ongoing conflict.

Gaza in Context Collaborative Teach-In Series

We are together experiencing a catastrophic unfolding of history as Gaza awaits a massive invasion of potentially genocidal proportions. This follows an incessant bombardment of a population increasingly bereft of the necessities of living in response to the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7. The context within which this takes place includes a well-coordinated campaign of misinformation and the unearthing of a multitude of essentialist and reductionist discursive tropes that depict Palestinians as the culprits, despite a context of structural subjugation and Apartheid, a matter of consensus in the human rights movement.

The co-organizers below are convening weekly teach-ins and conversations on a host of issues that introduce our common university communities, educators, researchers, and students to the history and present of Gaza, in context. 

Co-organizers: Arab Studies Institute, Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, George Mason University’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Program, Rutgers Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Birzeit University Museum, Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies, University of Chicago’s Center for Contemporary Theory, Brown University’s New Directions in Palestinian Studies, Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies, Georgetown University-Qatar, American University in Cairo’s Alternative Policy Studies, Middle East Studies’ Global Academy, University of Chicago’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, CUNY’s Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center, George Mason University’s Center for Global Islamic Studies, University of Illinois Ghicago’s Arab American Cultural Center, George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies

Featuring

Adam Horowitz is an editor of the website Mondoweiss, which covers the Israel-Palestine conflict. He received his master's degree in Near Eastern Studies from New York University. He later served as the Director of the Israel/Palestine Program for the American Friends Service Committee where he gained "extensive on-the-ground experience in Israel/Palestine". In addition to Mondoweiss, Horowitz has written for The Nation, AlterNet, The Huffington Post, and The Hill.com. He has spoken frequently on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict on campuses and to organizations

Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She held the Qatar Postdoctoral Fellowship at Georgetown University and the Europe in the Middle East Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Seikaly was Director of the Middle East Studies Center at the American University in Cairo (2012-2014), where she was awarded an Excellence in Teaching Award in 2014. Seikaly's Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores how Palestinian capitalists and British colonial officials used economy to shape territory, nationalism, the home, and the body. Her forthcoming book, From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine focuses on a Palestinian man who was at once a colonial officer and a colonized subject, an enslaver and a refugee. His trajectory from nineteenth century mobility across Baltimore and Sudan to twentieth century immobility in Lebanon places the question of Palestine in a global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession. Seikaly is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the Academic Senate, the University of California, Santa Barbara; the Harold J. Plous Award at UCSB; and the UC President’s Faculty Research Fellowship. She currently serves as co-editor of Journal of Palestine Studies and co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya.

John Reynolds joined the School of Law in Maynooth in 2014. Prior to this he taught at the European Inter-University Centre in Venice, and the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the University of Galway, where he held the National University of Ireland EJ Phelan Fellowship in International Law. John holds PhD and LLM degrees in international law from NUI Galway. John's research focuses on questions of international law in relation to colonialism, racism/apartheid, emergency, and political economy. His work is informed by and engages with the insights of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). John's book on Empire, Emergency and International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2017) was awarded the Kevin Boyle Book Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. His scholarship appears in journals such as the European Journal of International Law, Third World Quarterly, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, the Journal of Conflict & Security Law, the UCLA Law Review, the American Journal of International Law, and the Palestine Yearbook of International Law. He is a founding editor of the Third World Approaches to International Law Review journal and website. John's writing also appears in a range of other popular publications including Jacobin, Tribune, Monthly Review, Africa is a Country, Counterpunch, Jadaliyya, Dublin Review of Books, The Phoenix, and The Irish Times. John is Programme Director of Maynooth's LL.M in International Justice. He teaches modules on the Department of Law’s LL.M and LL.B programmes on: public international law; race, racism & law; world trade law; economic, social & cultural rights. John's completed and current Ph.D research students span projects across international law and legal theory including: civil war and peace agreements; the politics and prevention of genocide; European migration and border policies; radical left social movement engagement with law and human rights; and civil society projects in settler colonial contexts. He is happy to receive Ph.D proposals in areas of international law, imperialism, rights, and related fields. John works with various activist groups, social movements and civil society organisations. He was appointed to Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs Civil Society Standing Committee on Human Rights in 2015. 

Shira Robinson works on the social and cultural history of the Modern Middle East, with an emphasis on colonialism, citizenship, nationalism, and cultures of militarism after World War I. She joined GW in 2007 after two years of teaching at the University of Iowa and one year as Visiting Fellow at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. She received her B.A. in Middle Eastern and North African Studies from the University of Michigan and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Stanford University. Dr. Robinson's research has been funded through the Fulbright Institute, the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, and the Palestinian American Research Center. She also spent a year at the Center for the Advanced Study of Arabic at the American University in Cairo. In 2006 her dissertation won the Halpern Biennial Dissertation Award from the Association for Israel Studies. Professor Robinson works on the social and cultural history of the Modern Middle East, with an emphasis on colonialism, citizenship, nationalism, and cultures of militarism after World War I.

Bassam Haddad (Moderator) is Founding Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the acclaimed series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam serves on the Board of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and is Executive Producer of Status Audio Magazine and Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI). He received MESA's Jere L. Bacharach Service Award in 2017 for his service to the profession. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book titled Understanding the Syrian Calamity: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).