Books for understanding Iran and the Middle East

Posted on March 18, 2026 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase our books that offer context for the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran and responses throughout the region. All of our Middle East Studies titles are available here.

Disabling Relations: Wounded Bodyminds and Transnational Praxis, by Sona Kazemi, bears witness to disabled survivors of violence in Iran from war, incarceration, acid attacks, and torture.

How do we learn to defetishize disability in our everyday lives? In Disabling Relations, Sona Kazemi probes this and other questions that consider how processes and relations of patriarchy, imperialism, and religious fundamentalism, as well as class and ideology, rework the dialectics of disability in transnational contexts.

Read Sona Kazemi’s blog entry, Encountering Wounded Bodyminds

Proper Women: Feminism and the Politics of Respectability in Iran, by Fae Chubin provides an intersectional analysis of Iran’s feminist activism through an ethnographic study of an NGO-led women’s empowerment program.

Proper Women tells the unprecedented story of an NGO-led “women’s empowerment” program in Tehran that was created to serve young, impoverished Iranians and Afghan refugees. Fae Chubin recounts the well-intentioned efforts of cosmopolitan NGO administrators whose loyalty to liberal feminist principles of individualism, sexual autonomy, and anti-traditionalism complicated their objective of empowering marginalized women.

Read Fae Chubin’s blog entry, Complicating Female Empowerment in Iran

Contours of Israeli Politics: Jewish Ethnicity, Religious Nationalism, and Democracy, by Hannah M. Ridge, examines the effect of ethnic diversity and privilege within the Jewish Israeli population on public opinion and attitudes about identity and democracy.

There is no single Jewish ethnicity, and no single Jewish ethnic group constitutes a clear majority of Jewish Israelis. These intra-Jewish differences permit a social hierarchy within the “in-group” – Jewish Israelis – that privileges the Ashkenazi Jews of European descent over Mizrahi/Sephardi Jews of Middle Eastern backgrounds. The timely Contours of Israeli Politics focuses on the socio-political ramifications of this hierarchy within the upper stratum of Israeli society. 

Read Hannah Ridge’s blog entry, Examining Diversity and Privilege with the Jewish Israeli Population

Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism: Lessons from Hannah Arendt and Other Pariahs, by Jonathan Graubart, is a compelling diagnosis of the long-reigning pathologies and practices of Zionism and a prescription for reforming Jewish self-determination

Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism examines the liberal Zionist and Jewish anti-Zionist perspectives that developed in the decades following Israeli statehood. In his timely book, Jonathan Graubart, advances a non-statist vision of Jewish self-determination to be realized in a binational political arrangement that rejects Apartheid practices and features a just and collaborative coexistence of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. The book’s vision advances a distinct Jewish self-determination committed to cultural enrichment and emancipation, internationalism, and the fostering of new political, social, and economic channels for attaining genuine reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.

Read Jonathan Graubart’s blog entry, Discovering a Liberating Vision of Jewish Self-Determination in an Age of Entrenched Apartheid and an interview with the author.

The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination, by Greg Burris, provides a window into the Palestinian freedom struggle, drawing on an analysis of Palestinian film and media.

Is there a link between the colonization of Palestinian lands and the enclosing of Palestinian minds? The Palestinian Idea argues that it is precisely through film and media that hope can occasionally emerge amidst hopelessness, emancipation amidst oppression, freedom amidst apartheid. Greg Burris employs the work of Edward W. Said, Jacques Rancière, and Cedric J. Robinson in order to locate Palestinian utopia in the heart of the Zionist present.

Read Greg Burris’ blog entry, Applying Black Radical Thought in Palestinian Film and Media.

Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut, by Ghassan Moussawi, provides the first comprehensive study to employ the lens of queer lives in the Arab World to understand everyday life disruptions, conflicts, and violence.

Disruptive Situations challenges representations of contemporary Beirut as an exceptional space for LGBTQ people by highlighting everyday life in a city where violence is the norm. Ghassan Moussawi, a Beirut native, seeks to uncover the underlying processes of what he calls “fractal orientalism,” a relational understanding of modernity and cosmopolitanism that illustrates how transnational discourses of national and sexual exceptionalism operate on multiple scales in the Arab world.

Read Ghassan Moussawi’s blog entry, Living Amidst Constant Disruptions that Keep Taking on New Forms.

Israel’s Dead Soul, by Steven Salaita, explains how Zionism became an exceptional ideology in the eyes of the West.

Israel’s Dead Soul explores the failures of Zionism as a political and ethical discourse. Steven Salaita argues that endowing nation-states with souls is a dangerous phenomenon because it privileges institutions and corporations rather than human beings.

Read Steven Salaita’s blog entry, The Unmaking of Israel’s Soul and the Making of Israel’s Dead Soul.

Filed under: american studies, cultural studies, Disability Studies, ethics, gender studies, health, History, immigration, Jewish, Labor Studies, LGBT studies, literature, Mass Media and Communications, philosophy, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, Religion, sexuality, sociology, transnational politics, Urban Studies, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

An interview with Jonathan Graubart

Posted on November 8, 2023 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, we repost an interview with Jonathan Graubart, author of Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism, which first appeared in the Academe blog on November 6.

BY JENNIFER RUTH

The situation in the Middle East demands the best of all of us. Yet so many capitalize on the moment to harness the conflict to their own domestic “culture wars” agenda. Typical are op-eds like this one, arguing that contextualization, when in support of Palestinian refugees, amounts to little more than illiberal “identity politics.” In another one, Simon Sebag Montefiore, writing for the Atlantic, short-circuits attempts to raise the context of mid-century colonialism by heaping scorn on “the decolonization narrative,” calling it “a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century.” We need more forums where we hear from academics who have thought long and hard about the history and can move us past the binaries that have come to dominate the discourse—academics like Jonathan Graubart, professor of political science at San Diego State, who wrote this post and whose book Jewish Self-Determination Beyond Zionism: Lessons from Hannah Arendt and Other Pariahs was published this year.

Jewish Self-Determination Beyond Zionism places readers in dialogue with thinkers like Martin Buber, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Ella Shohat, and, of course, as the subtitle indicates, Hannah Arendt. I just finished Graubart’s chapter on Arendt and was reminded of all the reasons why “The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man” in Origins of Totalitarianism remains one of the most important pieces ever written. The “solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees,” Arendt wrote, demonstrating how linking self-determination to nation-states has produced a crisis of statelessness in every part of the globe. Graubart’s deeply insightful and necessary book enlists Arendt and other voices to establish “a foundation for a contemporary dissenting Jewish perspective, which challenges the fundamental premise of Zionism and reconceives Jewish self-determination to require a just and interactive co-existence among Jews and Palestinians” (4).

I asked Jonathan if he were willing to answer a few questions for the blog and he graciously agreed.

JR:  Why did you feel compelled to write this book?

JG: I’ve been active in the Jewish peace and dissent movement for about thirty-five years and in scholarly research on Israel-Palestine for two decades. The grim direction of Israeli society and its stance toward Palestinians led me to undergo a fundamental probing of what went wrong with Zionism and of how to reimagine Jewish self-determination to be compatible with a just coexistence of Jews and Palestinian Arabs. For inspiration, I looked back to a group of far-sighted dissenting Jewish Zionists from the pre-state era, who I label Humanist Zionists. They looked to the ancient holy Jewish site of Palestine as a base for invigorating Jewish life globally, reviving Hebrew as a spoken language and developing just institutions and practices informed by the best of Jewish and outside values and traditions. In opposition to the mainstream Zionists, they opposed a Jewish nation-state because doing so would subjugate and displace the majority Arab population in Palestine and elevate realpolitik and state interests over Jewish renewal and social justice. More generally, the Humanist Zionists warned the Zionist movement—albeit with no success—against embracing nationalism and imperialism, the two umbrella dynamics that proved devastating to Europe, the world, and to the Jews in particular.

These dissenters were not a large group but included influential Jewish figures, such as Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Henrietta Szold, and, my personal favorite, Hannah Arendt. They proposed a binational federation that would allow for a just and egalitarian coexistence of Palestine’s Jewish and Arab communities. Although the Humanist Zionist vision lost out, I have found that its insights for advancing both a reckoning of the harms inflicted by the Zionist project and a new vision of Jewish self-determination have become more important than ever.

JR: Has the reception of your book been impacted by the Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza?

JG: These events have sparked greater interest in my book. I’ve had receptive audiences when presenting my book to universities in the US and England and been invited to speak on multiple media outlets, including Al Jazeera Arabic, a progressive Black radio station in Philadelphia, and the Majority Report with Sam Seder. People are much more interested in learning about alternative visions and programs for coexistence. Most gratifying has been the warm reactions I’ve received from Jewish college students. To be sure, my book talk was cancelled at both Oxford University and Cambridge University because of pressure placed on the sponsoring departments to avoid topics that appeared overly critical of Zionism.

JR: Apart from the book, you have a long record of criticizing Israel’s grave abuses of human rights and international humanitarian law, as reflected most recently in your op-ed for Common Dreams, “Why One-Sided US Condemnation of Hamas is Morally Tone-Deaf, Self-Absolving, and Counter-Productive.” You have also raised regular concerns about the efforts of mainstream American Jewish organizations to chill critical discussion on college campuses of Israeli policies. What do your experiences tell us about the current state of academic freedom in the US?

JG: There has been a growing disjuncture over the past several decades on American campuses. On one side is a robust criticism of Israeli policies and US complicity and empathy for Palestinians. This shift extends to Jewish students, who are much more likely than older Jews to consider Israel’s treatment of Palestinians a form of apartheid. On the other side are campus Hillels, affiliated Israel-advocacy groups, and a network of well-endowed Israel-advocacy groups ranging from far-right groups, such as the Canary Mission, and centrist ones, such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Part of their advocacy consists of weaponizing the charge of antisemitism to discredit individuals and organizations they deem hostile to Israel. Guided by the definition from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which employs the expansive language of “double standards” and disproportionality, the Israel-advocacy networks have lobbied colleges and universities to classify anti-Zionism, support for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS), and other strong criticisms of Israel as antisemitic. Crucially, they are backed by high-end donors and leading politicians. In 2019, President Trump signed an Executive Order that empowers the Department of Education to apply the IHRA definition of antisemitism as a guide to find violations of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  President Biden has not rescinded this order. Advocacy groups have already mobilized this new legal tool to take on university programs linked to Middle East issues. [JR: See the AAUP’s 2022 Statement “Legislative Threats to Academic Freedom: Redefinitions of Antisemitism and Racism”]

The Israel-advocacy networks primarily target two categories of people and organizations. One is critical Jewish academics, such as myself, who link our analysis to a distinct Jewish perspective. We are seen as dangerous for disrupting the narrative that all Jews identify closely with the position taken by the establishment advocacy groups. At San Diego State, a number of local groups and individuals have warned Jewish students away from certain of my classes, and appealed to university leaders to either have me removed from public panels on Palestine-Israel or properly “balanced” by a supposed “pro-Israel” Jewish voice. Because I am a tenured professor sufficiently invested in these issues to sustain personal attacks and at a campus where academic freedom is mostly protected, I have not been silenced. Not all Jewish academic critics, however, have enjoyed my luck.

The second targeted group are primarily Arab and other Muslim students and groups, such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Hard-right Israel-advocacy groups, such as the Canary Mission and Stand with Us, openly intimidate students with hostile questions, especially women wearing hijabs, and place students on various “wanted” lists of antisemites and terrorist supporters. At SDSU, I have seen a number of students traumatized by such “doxing” and others who have decided not to express a critical opinion in public. The organization Palestine Legal maintains a more comprehensive compilation across the country of such instances.

The current conflict has intensified the intimidation campaigns. Hillel International, the ADL, and others are encouraging Jewish students to file Title VI complaints. The ADL and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law are imploring universities to investigate their SJP chapter for giving material support to terrorists. Florida has already moved to ban SJP from its colleges. Importantly, the attacks are not limited to those who arguably expressed support for the initial Hamas invasion but extend to all those who added an “and” to their condemnation of Hamas’ atrocities. Anyone who has provided a broader context and/or also condemned the nature of Israel’s horrific response has been accused of “moral equivalency” and soft on terrorists. In other words, the very act of providing a broader understanding, an essential task of universities, is now deemed as antisemitism or, in the case of Jewish critics, “self-hating.”

Sadly, antisemitism, as well as Islamophobia, has surged in the US, including on college campuses, and demands condemnation and proactive measures. But mobilizing the charge of antisemitism to suppress much-needed scrutiny of Israeli actions is not the way to proceed. As Hannah Arendt argued decades ago, the answer lies in solidarity with all oppressed and probing scrutiny not just of outside persecution but the wrongful actions of one’s own community. The zero-sum, hardline nationalist path chosen by partisan Israel-advocates represents a step backward, an anti-antisemitism of fools.  It is, thus, more urgent than ever to reinvigorate robust discussion and scrutiny, which demands vigorous defense of academic freedom and freedom of expression.

Jennifer Ruth is a contributing editor for Academe Blog and the author, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom and co-editor, with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson, of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom, forthcoming from Beacon Press.

Jonathan Graubart is a professor of political science at San Diego State University who specializes in the areas of international relations, international law, Zionism and Jewish dissent, Israel-Palestine, the United Nations, normative theory, and resistance politics and the author of Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism: Lessons from Hannah Arendt and other Pariahs.

Filed under: Jewish, philosophy, political science, race and ethnicity, Religion, sociology, transnational politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Recovering a Liberating Vision of Jewish Self-Determination in an Age of Entrenched Apartheid

Posted on May 10, 2023 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Jonathan Graubart, author of Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism, reflects on why he no longer identifies as “pro-Israel.”

I

In the early 1990s, I worked at Tikkun Magazine, then the leading liberal-left American Jewish journal. As a young American Jew whose views on Israel had recently become much more critical, I was especially attracted to a forum that challenged Israel’s occupation from an alternative “pro-Israel” perspective. Under Michael Lerner’s leadership, Tikkun provided a much-needed challenge to the American Jewish establishment on Jewish moral responsibility and ethics. I proudly aligned my critical scrutiny with a vision invested in the long-term welfare of Israel and the Jewish people at large. We were the bona fide pro-Israel Jews, while groups such as AIPAC and the ADL, who reflexively defended Israeli actions, were the false champions.

Up through the first part of the 2000s, I faithfully proclaimed my pro-Israel sentiments even as I raised more severe challenges. But like a growing number of Jews committed to justice and solidarity with the oppressed, I have stopped calling myself pro-Israel or Zionist. To begin with, the appeal to an alternative pro-Israel program is decidedly inadequate for confronting Israel’s depravities over the past two decades. As confirmed by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B’Tselem, Israel is an apartheid state where Jewish supremacy prevails in both the occupied territories and in Israel proper. It now has a Kahanist, Itamar Ben-Gvir, as national security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, with links to Jewish terrorists, as finance minister, whose mandate extends to the occupied territories. Ben-Gvir opened his tenure by ordering a ban on public displays of the Palestinian flag and approving harsher crackdowns of protests. Not to be outdone, Smotrich opined that the West Bank town of Huwara should be “wiped out” after it had just been subjected to settler violence. These trends confirm the haunting assessment in 2016 by the recently departed Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell:

We are at the height of an erosion process of the liberal values in which our society is based. Those who regard liberal values as a danger to the nation, the homeland and the Jewish state are the ones currently in power. They are striving to delegitimize the left and anyone who does not hold the view that conquering the land and settling it through the use of force are the fundamental foundations of Zion.

Furthermore, unlike Sternhell or Peter Beinart, I find no solace in Israel’s foundational principles. As I review in my book Jewish Self-Determination Beyond Zionism, any liberal values were dwarfed by a commitment to converting a territory that had long been overwhelmingly Arab to a hegemonic Jewish state where the Arab presence was inherently suspect. This is not to say that Israel’s current status inevitably followed from its foundation. Suffice it to note that Jewish supremacy has reigned though all of Israel’s political shifts since 1948. Thus, it is not clear what is the foundation for an alternative pro-Israel program. Fittingly, Tikkun has been supplanted by Jewish Currents as the preeminent critical American Jewish journal, which makes no pretense to providing an alternative Zionist or pro-Israel perspective.

Nevertheless, I have not joined the growing ranks of anti-Zionist Jewish dissenters for two reasons. First, neither the vast majority of Israeli Jews nor Jews elsewhere are about to renounce some form of Jewish self-determination in the territory of Israel-Palestine. Second, although the prevailing Zionist wing demanded Jewish supremacy, the umbrella vision contained appealing dimensions of liberation, egalitarianism, and a just coexistence with Palestinians. Indeed, as Noam Chomsky once remarked, Zionism attracted many Jews who aspired to a transformed Jewish society that would be part of a broader global revolution. Crucially the spirit of an alternative, solidarity-based self-determination still inspires Jewish dissenters. Hence, I regard it as urgent to develop a vision that enables self-determination to flourish for both Jews and Palestinians while categorically breaking from the imperialist and hegemonic nationalist order that has shaped the land since the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

My book reflects my effort to advance such a transformation. I recover the dissenting pre-state Zionist Jewish voices, which included Judah Magnes (a prominent American rabbi and the first chancellor of Hebrew University), Martin Buber, and Hannah Arendt. They looked to Palestine as a base for invigorating Jewish life globally, reviving Hebrew as a spoken language and developing community institutions and practices informed by the best of Jewish and outside values and traditions. In contrast to the mainstream Zionist movement, the dissenters were anti-imperialist and urged an accommodation with the indigenous Arabs. They opposed a hegemonic Jewish state because it would displace Palestinians and elevate realpolitik and state interests over Jewish renewal and social justice. Their alternative was a binational political arrangement, which featured autonomous development for each community, collective equality and shared spaces of governance and community interactions. I adapt this pre-state vision in conversation with a series of post-1967 critical voices, including Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Peter Beinart, and Edward Said to develop a new vision of Jewish self-determination devoted to a hybrid Jewish-universal liberation, a full reckoning of Israel’s depredations, and a just and egalitarian coexistence with Palestinians.

Because the terms “pro-Israel” and “Zionism” have become so attached to a hegemonic and unrepentant set of values, I am not seeking to rescue them. For that reason, I have titled my book Jewish Self-Determination Beyond Zionism. It is neither “pro” nor “anti” Israel but a plea for a new and inclusive program of Jewish self-determination whereby the fate of the Jewish people is attached to that of Palestinians in particular and of the global community more broadly. It is my hope that a new generation of what Arendt called “conscious pariahs,” some of whom have taken part in Israel’s ongoing and unprecedented wave of mass protests, will embrace such a program.

Filed under: civil rights, cultural studies, History, Jewish, Mass Media and Communications, philosophy, political science, race and ethnicity, Religion, sociology, transnational politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started