Our Past Programming
Access recordings of our previous speakers and courses
June 18, 2026
Holding Liat: Virtual Film Screening and Discussion
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Discussion with filmmakers Brandon and Lance Kramer, film participant Joel Beinin, and Rabbi Benjamin Barnett. HOLDING LIAT won the Best Documentary Award at the Berlin Film Festival, was an official selection in more than 75 film festivals internationally, broadcast on BBC Storyville, selected as one of the Washington Post's Top 10 Films of the Year and one of the Guardian UK's top films of 2025, and was recently Shortlisted for the 2026 Academy Awards for Best Documentary.
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https://vimeo.com/1204255127?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci
May 13, 2026
Journeys to the Heart of Israel-Palestine
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Palestinian-American legal scholar Omar Dajani and Jewish-Canadian political scientist Mira Sucharov are Middle East experts with deep attachments to the land between the river and the sea. They traveled there together six times, to teach each other about the country they both love. The catastrophic violence and seismic political changes over the course of these journeys strained their ties to their respective communities and to each other. In this talk, Mira and Omar will describe their insights about what sharing this most contested of spaces will require. Their conversations, their observations, and their experiences—as well as the lingering gaps and silences between them—offer a window into how people navigate and negotiate their needs, dreams, and desires and the emotional hold of identity and place.
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Mon. April 6
Dr. Karameh Hawash-Kuemmerle
Doctors against Genocide: The Moral Imperative to Protect Life
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Karameh Hawash-Kuemmerle, MD, is a Boston-based pediatric neurologist and a co-founder of Doctors Against Genocide. She spoke about the current medical reality in Gaza, offered a picture of the health disasters created by genocide, and shared the mission and work of Doctors Against Genocide.
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https://vimeo.com/1182005648
Jan. 7 – Feb. 4, 2026
Class taught by Joel Beinin
Thinking About Palestine and Israel After the Destruction of Gaza
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Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus at Stanford University. His research and teaching have been focused on the history and political economy of modern Egypt, Palestine, and Israel, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He has written or edited twelve books. In 2001-02 he served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.
Joel has been engaged with Israel/Palestine and the broader Middle East since he was a teenager. He spent six months in Israel after graduating high school and a summer in Cairo studying Arabic between his junior and senior years in college. In the early 1970s he lived on a kibbutz in the northern Negev/Naqab and in Jerusalem, where he was a graduate student at the Hebrew University. In Jerusalem he was active in the student-based Israeli New Left (Siach) and experienced a political reawakening while participating in the opposition to the first stages of Israel’s settlement project in the occupied Palestinian territories and supporting the Mizrahi Israeli Black Panther movement.
After many detours through which he learned a few things that were not on any syllabus at Princeton and Harvard (where he received his BA and MA respectively), he enrolled in the PhD program in Middle East history at the University of Michigan. During his studies, he worked with Palestinians, Israelis, and others in the Palestine Human Rights Campaign and the movement opposing Israel’s 1982 war on Lebanon. His doctoral research took him to live in Egypt for a year. He subsequently returned for research and extended residences in Egypt and Israel/Palestine and traveled extensively throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
After receiving his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1982, he moved with his family to California and Stanford University, where he taught from 1983 to 2019, with a two-year hiatus as Director of Middle East Studies at the American University in Cairo. text goes here
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What do we need to know to make sense of the horrific October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel? What are the appropriate contexts for the events? Can we forthrightly reject attacks on non-combatants as legitimate forms of resistance to oppression or retaliatory military action and simultaneously seek to understand the historical/structural factors that render such attacks likely rather than accidental or exceptional “excesses”?
Why was there such a complete failure of Israel’s intelligence, military, and first response teams on October 7? Why did Israel resort to mass bombing as the first response to October 7?
How did Benjamin Netanyahu come to be Israel’s longest serving Prime Minister?
Why do the Western countries support Israel?
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Item description
December 2, 2025
Jeff Halper
How Does Israel Get Away With It? Israel’s weapons and surveillance technology exports
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Jeff Halper is an Israeli anthropologist, the Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and a founding member of the Palestinian-led One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC). Jeff has served on the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, was a member of the international support committee of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Palestine and is currently a member of the International Gaza Tribunal. In 2008, he participated in the first (and successful) attempt of the Free Gaza Movement to break the Israeli siege by sailing into Gaza. Jeff spent much of his academic career as the head of the Middle East Center of Friends World College. Among his publications are War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification and Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism and the Case for One Democratic State. Jeff was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize: in 2025 with Palestinian human rights defender Issa Amro and in 2006 with Palestinian intellectual and activist Ghassan Andoni.
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After almost 80 years of colonization and almost 50 years of occupation, both amidst massive population displacement, land expropriation and genocide, Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper asks: How does Israel get away with it?
Join us as Jeff discusses how Israel has carved out a niche in what he calls “securocratic war” – counterinsurgency against peoples resisting neocolonial exploitation and the repression of people resisting their exclusion from the neoliberal marketplace. He will explain how Israel utilizes the weaponry, surveillance systems and tactics of population control developed in its Palestinian laboratory to act as an enforcer of global capitalism and the increasingly repressive regimes it is producing. As our governments’ militaries, security services and police forces become “Israelized,” Jeff argues, we the peoples of the world are being “Palestinianized.”
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Aug. 27, 2025
Rabbi David Basior, Professor David A. Love, and Rabbi Emily Cohen
Atoning for Gaza: North American Jews and the Work of Teshuvah
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Rabbi David Basior has served as the rabbi and acting director of Kadima Reconstructionist Community in Seattle since 2015, the year he was ordained. A community organizer and clergy activist, he was a founding member of the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council and was the co-chair of the Tikkun Olam Commission of Reconstructing Judaism.
David A. Love is assistant teaching professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University, and a freelance writer based in Philadelphia. His work centers on social justice, racism, media ethics and human rights. A Jew by choice, Love, and his family, have been members of Reconstructionist congregation Mishkan Shalom for 20 years.
Rabbi Emily Cohen has been the rabbi of West End Synagogue in New York City since 2020. She was ordained by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 2018 and is a creative ritualist, writer of Jewish music, activist, public speaker, and member of the NYC religious left. She is a regular writer for Hey Alma and is widely published in the Jewish press. She lives in Brooklyn.
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Reconstructionists Expanding Our Conversation on Israel/Palestine presents our Elul program. Rabbi David Basior, Professor David A. Love, and Rabbi Emily Cohen. address how we might think about and make reparations for Israel’s destruction of the Gaza Strip – personally and as Jewish communities – as we approach the 5786 High Holidays.
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May 27, 2025
Dove Kent and Dr. Natasha Roth-Rowland
Project Esther: Anatomy of an Authoritarian Threat
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Dove Kent is the U.S. Senior Director of Diaspora Alliance. She has served as the Executive Director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice and as Senior Strategy Officer at Bend the Arc. She is a co-founder of Tzedek Lab and a co-author of the culture-shifting publication "Understanding Antisemitism: An Offering to our Movement.” Her writings have appeared in anthologies as well as in such outlets as The Guardian, Vox, Ha’aretz, NPR, and Jewish Currents.
Natasha Roth-Rowland is Director of Research and Analysis at Diaspora Alliance and a former editor at +972 Magazine. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Virginia, where she wrote her dissertation on the Israeli- and American-Jewish far right. She lives in Queens, New York, with her wife and daughter.
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This program unpacks the threat posed by Project Esther, an anti-democratic blueprint from the same Heritage Foundation that authored Project 2025, and examine how it makes Jews the face of the Trump administration’s authoritarian crackdown. We will walk through the background and context for Project Esther as a way to understand where it came from and to identify the kind of interventions that are required from Jews and others to resist it.
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May 1, 2025
Attorney Meerah Shah and Professor Joseph Howley
Authoritarianism, Free Speech, and the Weaponization of Antisemitism
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Meera Shah is a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal. She oversees Palestine Legal's attorney network and supports the organization’s casework and advocacy related to free speech, academic freedom, and anti-Palestinian discrimination. She joined Palestine Legal in 2019 after several years working for human rights organizations and law school clinics serving marginalized communities.
Joseph Howley is Associate Professor of Classics at Columbia University. He teaches Latin, the history of the book, and Literature Humanities in Columbia’s Core Curriculum. He was active in defending the student encampment at Columbia. On March 12 he spoke at a rally in front of the New York City courthouse where the hearing of Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia graduate and green card holder now detained in Louisiana, took place.
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Major Jewish organizations and political figures have attacked advocacy for Palestinian rights as antisemitism long before the shocking October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. The unprecedented international movement that arose in response to Israel’s vengeful destruction of Palestinian life and society in the Gaza Strip in retaliation for October 7 prompted a vast escalation of attacks on Palestine solidarity activists. Why were universities and colleges particularly targeted during the Biden administration? Who else is in the crosshairs? Why has the Trump administration weaponized the false claim that advocating for Palestinian rights is antisemitism as a leading edge in its broader authoritarian program? How are attacks on Palestine-related freedom of expression connected to the broader program of the MAGA authoritarians? How are people resisting these attacks?
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March 4, 11, 18 | 3 Sessions
Class taught by Joel Beinin
Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism
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Below are some suggested readings (and a video with a link). The books should be readily available from your local library or bookstore. Reviews of the books, and interviews with their respective authors, are also in circulation.
On Zionism
Zachary Lockman, “A Brief History of Zionism” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrUWHZgGaxk [youtube.com]
Or, if you prefer to read, Lockman’s article, “Zionism,” in Encyclopedia of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is attached to this email.
On Anti-Zionism
Marjorie Feld, The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism (NYU Press, 2024)
Geoffrey Levin, Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978 (Yale University Press, 2023)
On Antisemitism
Rachel Shabi, Off White: The Truth About Antisemitism (London: Oneworld, 2024)
Shane Burley and Ben Lorber, Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism (New York: Olive Branch, 2023)
Antony Lerman, Whatever Happened to Antisemitism? Redefinition and the Myth of the ‘Collective Jew’ (Pluto, 2021)
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Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus at Stanford University. His research and teaching have been focused on the history and political economy of modern Egypt, Palestine, and Israel, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He has written or edited twelve books. In 2001-02 he served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.
Joel has been engaged with Israel/Palestine and the broader Middle East since he was a teenager. He spent six months in Israel after graduating high school and a summer in Cairo studying Arabic between his junior and senior years in college. In the early 1970s he lived on a kibbutz in the northern Negev/Naqab and in Jerusalem, where he was a graduate student at the Hebrew University. In Jerusalem he was active in the student-based Israeli New Left (Siach) and experienced a political reawakening while participating in the opposition to the first stages of Israel’s settlement project in the occupied Palestinian territories and supporting the Mizrahi Israeli Black Panther movement.
After many detours through which he learned a few things that were not on any syllabus at Princeton and Harvard (where he received his BA and MA respectively), he enrolled in the PhD program in Middle East history at the University of Michigan. During his studies, he worked with Palestinians, Israelis, and others in the Palestine Human Rights Campaign and the movement opposing Israel’s 1982 war on Lebanon. His doctoral research took him to live in Egypt for a year. He subsequently returned for research and extended residences in Egypt and Israel/Palestine and traveled extensively throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
After receiving his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1982, he moved with his family to California and Stanford University, where he taught from 1983 to 2019, with a two-year hiatus as Director of Middle East Studies at the American University in Cairo.
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How we define and understand Zionism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism have been on many of our minds. One 90-minute session is obviously inadequate to cover the complexities of each of these interrelated topics. If you are new to this material, consider this a teaser and an invitation to explore the subject further in the suggested readings (below). If you have previously taken a class on these topics, I hope the historically-informed perspectives of this class may provide a new angle of vision.
I feel compelled to teach about antisemitism because antisemitic incidents have increased significantly in the US and globally since 2017. At the same time, major American Jewish organizations have, in tandem with white nationalist antisemites, distorted and weaponized the term to serve their political agendas. For example, the Antidefamation League (ADL) did not consider Elon Musk’s Nazi salutes at the inauguration of the 47th president of the United States an act with antisemitic implications. Yet the ADL would define as antisemitic university students – among them many Jews – chanting for Palestinian freedom “from the river to the sea" at the encampments that emerged on dozens of campuses since October 7, 2023.
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Zionism: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/1090225294
Anti-Zionism: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/1090225584
Antisemitism: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/1090225847
February 5, 2025
Peter Beinart
Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza
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Peter Beinart teaches national reporting and opinion writing at the Newmark J-School and political science at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, an MSNBC political commentator, author of The Beinart Notebook on Substack, a fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace, and the author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.
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In Peter Beinart’s view, one story dominates Jewish communal life: that of persecution and victimhood. It is a story that erases much of the nuance of Jewish religious tradition and warps our understanding of Israel and Palestine. After Gaza, where Jewish texts, history, and language have been deployed to justify mass slaughter and starvation, Beinart argues, Jews must tell a new story. After this war, whose horror will echo for generations, they must do nothing less than offer a new answer to the question: What does it mean to be a Jew?
Beinart imagines an alternate narrative, which would draw on other nations’ efforts at moral reconstruction and a different reading of Jewish tradition. A story in which Israeli Jews have the right to equality, not supremacy, and in which Jewish and Palestinian safety are not mutually exclusive but intertwined. One that recognizes the danger of venerating states at the expense of human life.
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Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (New York: Knopf, 2025)
Rabbis Benjamin Barnett, Sarah Brammer-Shlay, Elliott Tepperman
Organizing for Justice in the Era of Trump 2.0
January 21, 2025
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Benjamin Barnett graduated from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 2006 and has served as the rabbi of Havurah Shalom in Portland, Oregon since 2017. He was involved, both as a facilitator and initial board member, with the organization Encounter, which brings Jewish leaders into East Jerusalem and the West Bank to meet with Palestinians and begin to understand Palestinian realities. His life and leadership were shaped by those encounters, and he strives to integrate their insights and model into his work as a rabbi.
Sarah Brammer-Shlay graduated from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 2022. She serves as the Dean of Religious Life and Chaplain at Grinnell College in Iowa. At the core of her identity as a Jewish leader and community organizer is the desire for people to get out of isolation and into connection. She has more than 15 years of community organizing experience in a variety of fields, including, but not limited to, Israel/Palestine, labor, feminism, workers’ rights and health care. She was a co-founder of IfNotNow and has served in various roles for the Center for Jewish Nonviolence.
Elliott Tepperman has been the spiritual leader of Bnai Keshet, in Montclair, NJ since 2002 when he graduated from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. There he has worked to foster spiritually courageous Judaism as a springboard for building community and engaging with the world. He has served as President of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, sits on the JOIN for Justice Board and is the current Co-Chair of the J Street Rabbinic and Cantorial Cabinet.
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How should we, as Jews, confront the second Trump presidency? Can Jews be co-conspirators in progressive coalitions and stand in solidarity with communities directly targeted by the Trump administration – immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ people? What should be the place of the struggle for Palestinian rights and for the right to speak out on this issue in the agenda of the broad array of forces that must be mobilized to resist the “America First” MAGA program? How can we navigate staying in progressive political alliances when Israel/Palestine is either strategically used as a wedge issue or there are real differences of opinion?
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Professors Sonia Boulos and Lior Sternfeld
Israeli Politics and Public Culture in the Wake of October 7 and Mass Slaughter in Gaza and Lebanon
December 2, 2024
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Sonia Boulos, a Palestinian Arab citizen of Israel, is Associate Professor of international human rights law at the Faculty of Law and International relations, Antonio de Nebrija University, Spain. Her research focuses on international protection of human rights particularly the Palestinian minority in Israel. Her publications include: “The (Israeli) Nation State Law as an Offensive Settler Colonial Paradigm” (forthcoming, with Tamir Sorek); She is the co-editor of Palestine/Israel Review.
Lior Sternfeld, a Jewish citizen of Israel, is the William J. and Charlotte K. Duddy University Endowed Fellow in the Humanities and Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies. His first book, Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran (Stanford University Press, 2018), examines the development and integration of Jewish communities in Iran into the nation-building projects of the last century. He is the Associate Editor of Palestine/Israel Review.
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How have Palestinian citizens of Israel and Israeli Jews experienced the intensified culture of threat and division in Israeli society during this past year and with Israel's the massive rightward and messianic shift? To what extent have Palestinians and Jews been able to struggle together against an escalated atmosphere of hostility and intimidation? Is there a meaningful resistance movement against the current war and the rightward shift of the Jewish Israeli polity?
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Professor Omer Bartov
Gaza and the Question of Genocide
October 21, 2024
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Omer Bartov, the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, has written widely on war crimes, interethnic relations, and genocide. His books include Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), which won the National Jewish Book Award; Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022), and Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis (2023).
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Prof. Bartov’s talk examines the immediate causes and deeper roots of the current conflict, assessing the nature of events in Gaza and the West Bank and the political and ideological dynamics driving them. He reflects on how his perspective on the question of genocide changed over time.
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Omer Bartov, “As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel,” Guardian, Aug. 13, 2024
Professors Marjorie Feld and Geoffrey Levin
Legacies of Dissent: American Jews, Zionism, and Palestine
September 17, 2024
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Marjorie N. Feld is Professor of History at Babson College in Wellesley, MA, where she teaches courses on U.S. social, gender, and labor history, food justice and sustainability. She is the author of Lillian Wald: A Biography, which won the Saul Viener Book Prize of the American Jewish Historical Society, Nations Divided: American Jews and the Struggle Over Apartheid, and The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism.
Geoffrey Levin is assistant professor of Middle Eastern and Jewish Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. Prior to joining Emory's faculty, Levin was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Center for Jewish Studies after earning a PhD in Hebrew & Judaic Studies/History from New York University in 2019. His first book, Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978, has been discussed widely, including in The Washington Post, The Guarding, Haaretz, +972 Magazine, and The London Review of Books.
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Marjorie Feld’s The Threshold of Dissent and Geoffrey Levin’s Our Palestine Question reveal the long history of debates over Zionism and Israel within the American Jewish community. Levin records the voices of American Jews who called for an honest reckoning with the moral and political plight of Palestinians even before Israel’s founding. Feld examines how and why mainstream Jewish leaders marginalized anti- and non-Zionists from the 1880s through the 1980s. Feld and Levin spoke about the implications and costs of limiting the Jewish communal agenda with an eye toward today’s Jewish protests over the devastation in Gaza.
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Marjorie Feld, The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism (New York University Press, 2024)
Geoffrey Levin, Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978 (Yale University Press, 2023)
Rabbi Prof. Shaul Magid
Beyond Zionism and Anti-Zionism: On the Possibilities of a New Diasporism
June 17, 2024
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Shaul Magid is Visiting Professor of Modern Judaism and senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University. He previously taught Jewish Studies at Dartmouth, Indiana University, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and Rice University. He was ordained in Jerusalem and has served as the rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue since 1997. His many books and essays include, most recently, The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (Ayin Press, 2023) and Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton University Press, 2021). He is a member of the American Academy for Jewish Research and the American Society for the Study of Religion.
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October 7th and its aftermath marks a turning point for North American Jewry. Many Jews, traumatized by the atrocity of October 7th, have fiercely defended Zionism and Israel’s war, while others, horrified by the destruction of Gaza, have embraced anti-Zionism. Professor Shaul Magid explores the possibilities of North American Jewish life that continue to critique Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people while reaching beyond both Zionism and anti-Zionism arguing for a constructive Diasporism that refocuses Jewish life away from Israel and within the communities in which we live.
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Shaul Magid, The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (Ayin Press 2023)
Nathan Thrall
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
April 7, 2024
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Nathan Thrall is the author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (Metropolitan, 2023), winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and many other awards. His previous book is The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine (Metropolitan Press, 2017). His essays, reviews, and reported features have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project, and has taught at Bard College. Originally from California, he lives in Jerusalem.
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Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for the school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer in a horrific accident. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos—the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad’s fate. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Immersive and gripping, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine that offers a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth.
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Nathan Thrall: A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (Metropolitan Books, 2023) winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
Class Taught by Joel Beinin
Occupation 101
January-March 2024 | 8 Sessions
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Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus at Stanford University. His research and teaching have been focused on the history and political economy of modern Egypt, Palestine, and Israel, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He has written or edited twelve books. In 2001-02 he served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.
Joel has been engaged with Israel/Palestine and the broader Middle East since he was a teenager. He spent six months in Israel after graduating high school and a summer in Cairo studying Arabic between his junior and senior years in college. In the early 1970s he lived on a kibbutz in the northern Negev/Naqab and in Jerusalem, where he was a graduate student at the Hebrew University. In Jerusalem he was active in the student-based Israeli New Left (Siach) and experienced a political reawakening while participating in the opposition to the first stages of Israel’s settlement project in the occupied Palestinian territories and supporting the Mizrahi Israeli Black Panther movement.
After many detours through which he learned a few things that were not on any syllabus at Princeton and Harvard (where he received his BA and MA respectively), he enrolled in the PhD program in Middle East history at the University of Michigan. During his studies, he worked with Palestinians, Israelis, and others in the Palestine Human Rights Campaign and the movement opposing Israel’s 1982 war on Lebanon. His doctoral research took him to live in Egypt for a year. He subsequently returned for research and extended residences in Egypt and Israel/Palestine and traveled extensively throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
After receiving his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1982, he moved with his family to California and Stanford University, where he taught from 1983 to 2019, with a two-year hiatus as Director of Middle East Studies at the American University in Cairo.
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What is the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories it conquered from Jordan and Egypt in the June 1967 War – the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip? (Israel also conquered the Golan Heights from Syria and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, which it evacuated in 1982, in the same war, but we won’t be dealing with those territories.) What are the ideological and practical mechanisms that sustain the occupation? How did they come into existence? What are the differences and similarities in the status of the three territories? Is the occupation temporary? Can it be separated from the political regime that prevails inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders?
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Password for all Occupation 101 Sessions: recip2024
January 11, 2024, Beginnings of the Occupation Regime
January 18, 2024, The Rise of Orthodox Messianic Religio-Nationalism
January 25, 2024, The Legal Structure of the Occupation
February 1, 2024, Hebron and South Hebron Hills - The Logic of Occupation
February 8, 2024, Jerusalem
February 15, 2024, Jenin: From Battleground to Freedom Theater to Battleground
February 29, 2024, Gaza
March 7, 2024, Two Regimes?
Rabbi Rabbi Dev Noily (Kehilla Community Synagogue, Oakland, CA), Morriah Kaplan (IfNotNow Movement), Rabbi Alissa Wise (Rabbis for Ceasefire)
What Changed? What’s Next?
December 5, 2023
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Rabbi Dev Noily is senior rabbi at Kehilla Community Synagogue in Oakland, CA, in the Lisjan Ohlone territory of Huchiun. They are a co-founder of Synagogues Rising, a network of progressive, justice-oriented congregations. In 2019 Rabbi Dev co-founded Jews on Ohlone Land (JOOL) and serves on its leadership council. JOOL works in solidarity with the Confederated Villages of Lisjan to protect sacred sites and rematriate the land. It supports Jews to build community and spiritual practices that are rooted in the land of Huchiun. They graduated from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 2009.
Morriah Kaplan is the Managing Director of IfNotNow, a movement of American Jews organizing the Jewish community to reject US support for Israel’s systems of occupation and apartheid, and towards a vision of equality, justice, and a thriving future for all Palestinians and Israelis. She has served as IfNotNow's national spokesperson, appearing on BBC World, Al Jazeera, and multiple Jewish and mainstream news outlets. She grew up at Havurah Shalom, Portland’s Reconstructionist community, which instilled in her a deep sense of social justice which led her to anti-occupation organizing.
Rabbi Alissa Wise is a West Philadelphia-based organizational consultant, community organizer, educator, and ritual leader with over two decades of movement-building experience. She is currently organizing Rabbis for Ceasefire, a group comprised of rabbis from Conservative, Reform, Modern Orthodox, Reconstructionist, and Renewal communities speaking out with one voice to fulfill the most sacred obligation in Jewish tradition – pikuach nefesh, saving a life. Rabbi Alissa is the former Deputy Director of Jewish Voice for Peace. She graduated from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 2009. -
The vicious Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 and Israel’s brutal response may mark a pivotal moment in the trajectories of Israel/Palestine, the greater Middle East, and North American Jewish and Palestinian and Muslim communities. How have these events affected us already? What can we expect in the near future? What does it mean to be a progressive North American Jew in these new circumstances? How can Reconstructionist values guide us in this moment? Where can the movement for a just, democratic future of equality between Palestinians and Israeli Jews go next? What kind of relationship between North American Jewry and Israel/Palestine should we embrace?
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Professors Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Karin Loevy, and Tamir Sorek
The Current Situation in Israel/Palestine: Views From the Israeli Left
November 8, 2023
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Zvi ּBen-Dor Benite is Associate Vice Chancellor for Global Network Faculty Planning and professor in the Department of History and the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. His research interests include Middle Eastern History, History of Geography, Arab-Jewish and Mizrahi History. He is the author of several books including The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford, 2009) and Middle Eastern Jewish Thought (Brandeis, 2013).
Karin Loevy is the manager JSD Program at New York University School of Law and a researcher at the Institute for International Law and Justice where she leads the History & Theory of International Law workshop series. She is the author of Emergencies in Public Law: The Legal Politics of Containment (Cambridge University Press, 2016). She has also worked as a litigator with a leading Israeli public law firm.
Tamir Sorek is Professor of Middle East history at Penn State University. His research highlights the political role of sports, poetry, and collective memory. He is the author of The Optimist: A Social Biography of Tawfiq Zayyad (Stanford University Press, 2020), Palestinian Commemoration in Israel: Calendar, Monuments, and Martyrs (Stanford University Press, 2015) and Arab Soccer in a Jewish State: The Integrative Enclave (Cambridge University Press 2007).
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Three Israeli scholars share their insights about the current situation for Israeli Jews and Palestinians in the aftermath of Oct. 7 and the Israeli assault on Gaza. What background factors precipitated the crisis? What threats and opportunities do they pose for the future?
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Jonathan Kuttab
A Vision of Justice and Equality for All in Israel/Palestine
October 11, 2023
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A native of Bethlehem, Jonathan Kuttab received his J.D. from the University of Virginia Law School. He is a cofounder of Al-Haq, the premier human rights organization in Palestine, and Nonviolence International, which seeks to realize the worth and dignity of all people through the nonviolent resolution of conflicts around the globe. He is also executive director of FOSNA, a theological movement for Palestinian liberation that opposes Christian Zionism. His book, Beyond the Two-State Solution (Nonviolence International, 2021) offers a fresh and detailed vision for a binational state.
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Download a free copy of Jonathan Kuttab’s Beyond the Two-State Solution
Peter Beinart
Reparations and the Palestinian Right of Return as Teshuvah for the Nakba (the Palestinian catastrophe): Returning to the Path of Spiritual Growth, Self-Education, and Justice
August 30, 2023 / Elul 5783
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Peter Beinart is editor-at-large of Jewish Currents and hosts the “The Beinart Notebook,” a weekly series of newsletters and interviews. He is a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. A former editor of The New Republic, he has also written for Haaretz, Time, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The Guardian. He is also the author of three books including The Crisis of Zionism.
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During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Zionist militias and the Israeli army expelled some 750,000 Palestinians from the territories that became the State of Israel. Palestinian society, especially its urban, intellectual, and commercial elements, was destroyed. Palestinians call this the Nakba, or catastrophe. Most of those who became refugees committed no acts of violence against the Jewish community.
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Peter Beinart, “Teshuvah: A Jewish Case for Palestinian Refugee Return,” Jewish Currents, May 11, 2021
Sayed Kashua
Being Palestinian in a Jewish State
June 29, 2023
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Sayed Kashua is a Palestinian citizen of Israel, born in Tira. He is the author of four Hebrew novels — Dancing Arabs, Let It Be Morning, Second Person Singular, and Track Changes — for which he has received multiple literary awards.His satirical television series Avodah Aravit (Arab Labor) was enormously popular and critically acclaimed; his new series Madrasa (School) continues the exploration of Jewish and Arab relations that characterizes most of his work. For many years Kashua wrote a widely read weekly column Hebrew daily newspaper Haaretz. In 2014, he and his family left Israel because they no longer believed in a future in which “Arabs and Jews could share the country equally.” Kashua completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Washington University of St. Louis and now teaches at Emerson College in Boston.
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Co-sponsored with Canada’s Reconstructionist congregations: Darchei Noam (Toronto), Dorshei Emet (Montreal), and Or Haneshamah (Ottawa)
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Sayed Kashua, Track Changes (Grove Atlantic, 2021)
Sayed Kashua, Let it Be Morning (Grove Atlantic, 2004)
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Item description
Class taught by Joel Beinin
A History of Israel/Palestine
January-March 2023 | 10 Sessions
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Why did Jews in Eastern Europe come to embrace Zionism in the late-19th century? What was Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel)/Palestine like before the beginnings of modern Zionist settlement? Was it inevitable that the revival of a Jewish national community in Eretz Yisrael would entail a confrontation with the previously existing Palestinian Arab community? How did a movement among a small minority of Jews become the normative outlook for most late 20th century Jews? What kind of Jewish state was established in 1948? Why did it find itself in repeated wars with its Arab neighbors? Why haven’t efforts to resolve the conflict succeeded? Will Israel “forever live by the sword,” as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said?
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Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus at Stanford University. His research and teaching have been focused on the history and political economy of modern Egypt, Palestine, and Israel, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He has written or edited twelve books. In 2001-02 he served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.
Joel has been engaged with Israel/Palestine and the broader Middle East since he was a teenager. He spent six months in Israel after graduating high school and a summer in Cairo studying Arabic between his junior and senior years in college. In the early 1970s he lived on a kibbutz in the northern Negev/Naqab and in Jerusalem, where he was a graduate student at the Hebrew University. In Jerusalem he was active in the student-based Israeli New Left (Siach) and experienced a political reawakening while participating in the opposition to the first stages of Israel’s settlement project in the occupied Palestinian territories and supporting the Mizrahi Israeli Black Panther movement.
After many detours through which he learned a few things that were not on any syllabus at Princeton and Harvard (where he received his BA and MA respectively), he enrolled in the PhD program in Middle East history at the University of Michigan. During his studies, he worked with Palestinians, Israelis, and others in the Palestine Human Rights Campaign and the movement opposing Israel’s 1982 war on Lebanon. His doctoral research took him to live in Egypt for a year. He subsequently returned for research and extended residences in Egypt and Israel/Palestine and traveled extensively throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
After receiving his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1982, he moved with his family to California and Stanford University, where he taught from 1983 to 2019, with a two-year hiatus as Director of Middle East Studies at the American University in Cairo.
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Password for recording of each class is january2023
Class 1 - Introduction, Expectations, Beginnings of Zionism
Class 2 - Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period
Class 3 - Zionists Encounter Palestine
Class 4 - Great Britain and the Palestine Mandate
Class 5 - 1948: Nakba/War of Liberation
Class 6 - “Beautiful Israel”?
Class 7 - Palestinians and the PLO
Class 8 - The 1967 War
Class 9 - The Occupation, the 1st Intifada, and the Oslo Process
Class 10 - Reprise: How did we get here?
Fall 2022 | 6 Sessions
Speaker Series: Palestinian Scholars and Activists
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Prof. Rashid Khalidi - “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine”
Nadia Saah - “The Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948”
Dr. Basma Fahoum - “Palestinian Citizens of Israel”
Yafa Jarrar - The West Bank: Life Under Apartheid”
Jehad Abusalim - “The Gaza Strip”
Prof. Sa’ed Atshan - “Jerusalem”
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Much of the feedback from our speaker series featuring Reconstructionist rabbis requested that we present Palestinian voices. So here are some.
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Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (Metropolitan Books, 2020)
Project48 (founded by Nadia Saah), educational materials, curriculum, eyewitness testimonies, images, videos and artifacts that bring to life the Palestinian Nakba
“The Present” - a short film about life in the West Bank. Farah Nabulsi, Director, Co-Writer and Executive Producer. Available on Netflix, Youtube, Vimeo, and Amazon Prime
Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, Mike Merryman-Lotze (eds.), Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire (Haymarket Books, 2022)
Sa’ed Atshan, Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2020)
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Rashid Khalidi
Speaker Series: Reconstructionist Rabbis and Rabbinical Students
Winter-Spring 2022 | 8 sessions
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Click here for full bios of speakers.
January 12 - Rabbi Rebecca Alpert, “Reconstructionism Without Zionism”
January 26 - Rabbinical students Sarah Brammer-Shlay, Solomon Hoffman, and Rachel Kipnes, "'We Find Ourselves in Tears': A Conversation About Israel/Palestine with Reconstructionist Rabbinical Students"
February 9 - Rabbi Brant Rosen, “Decolonizing Jewish Liturgy”
February 22 - Rabbi Toba Spitzer, “A New Conversation: A Land for All”
March 9 - Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman, “From Preschool to Birthright: A Critique of Israel Education”
March 30 - Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari, “Becoming an Abolitionist: Antiracism and Antizionism”
April 12 - Rabbi David Teutsch, “History and Challenge: Reconstructionism, Zionism, and the Two-State Solution”
April 26 - Rabbi Brian Walt, “Nakba Denial and Teshuva/Reparations”
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A series of learning opportunities led by Reconstructionist rabbis on Israel/Palestine. Guided by the values of justice and the dignity and equal worth of all human life, we seek to promote discussion of the histories and current conditions of Israel/Palestine that challenge the boundaries of current Reconstructionist approaches to Israel/Palestine and re-examine customary assumptions about the role of Israel in diaspora Jewish life. We oppose Israel’s domination of the Palestinian people in all its forms and hope to deepen our relationship with Jews and Palestinians seeking a future of justice and equality in Israel/Palestine. We welcome those who consider themselves Zionists, non-Zionists, and anti-Zionists, and those unsure about how they define themselves, even as we explore the meanings of these terms.
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Rabbi Rebecca T. Alpert, “Reconstructionism Without Zionism” Evolve, May 31, 2022
Rabbi Toba Spitzer, “A New Mitzvah: Loving All Those Who Dwell in the Land,” Evolve, Apr. 22, 2022
Rabbi Brant Rosen, Wrestling in the Daylight: A Rabbi’s Path to Palestinian Solidarity (2017 edition)
Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman, Reframing Israel: Teaching Kids to Think Critically About the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2015)
Rabbi David Teutsch, “The History of the Reconstructionist Approach to Israel, Zionism and the Treatment of Palestinians,” Evolve, May 23, 2022
“Gates of Tears’: rabbinical and cantorial students stand for solidarity with Palestinians,” Forward, May 13, 2021
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Rabbi Rebecca Alpert, “Reconstructionism Without Zionism”
Rabbinical students Sarah Brammer-Shlay, Solomon Hoffman, and Rachel Kipnes, "'We Find Ourselves in Tears': A Conversation About Israel/Palestine with Reconstructionist Rabbinical Students"
Rabbi Brant Rosen, “Decolonizing Jewish Liturgy”
Rabbi Toba Spitzer, “A New Conversation: A Land for All”
Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman, “From Preschool to Birthright: A Critique of Israel Education”
Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari, “Becoming an Abolitionist: Antiracism and Antizionism”
Rabbi David Teutsch, “History and Challenge: Reconstructionism, Zionism, and the Two-State Solution”
April 26 - Rabbi Brian Walt, “Nakba Denial and Teshuva/Reparations”
Rabbi Brian Walt and Professor Joel Beinin
Do we need to engage in collective teshuva for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people?
August-September 2021 /Elul 5781 | 2 sessions
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During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Zionist militias and the Israeli army expelled some 750,000 Palestinians from the territories that became the State of Israel. Palestinian society, especially its urban, intellectual, and commercial elements, was destroyed - what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe. Most of those who became refugees committed no acts of violence against the Jewish community. We will offer teachings based on Jewish tradition and recent reports of Israeli and international human rights organizations.
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Rabbi Brian Walt, “Nakba Denial and ‘Teshuvah’/Reparations,” Evolve, Apr. 10, 2023
Joel Beinin, “Socialism, Zionism, and Settler Colonialism in Israel/Palestine,” Cambridge History of Socialism vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
B’Tselem “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid,” Jan. 12, 2021