Unpacking Zionism (Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism)

In this episode on Zionism and anti-Zionism, we talk with Ronit Lentin. She outlines the processes by which Zionism adopts race science and rewrites history and Jewish identity to fit it. This is a wide-ranging conversation that draws on research, family history, and decades of antiracist work — and ends with exile.

This special episode maps the wide-ranging counterinsurgency against the anticolonial Palestine solidarity movement in the U.S., and opens a conversation on strategy for resistance. Lara Friedman, Amira Jarmakani, and Emmaia Gelman talk through campus safety narratives, Zionist “antisemitism watchdogs”, and a mushrooming landscape of federal and state legislation. This panel was recorded as part of the American Studies Association May 2024 Mini-Conference.

This week's episode is accompanied by a trove of materials. In the show notes, listeners can access the slides for Dr. Jarmakani’s talk, Lara Friedman's essential work on tracking legislation, and Emmaia Gelman's article on “Astroturf Antisemitism Watchdogs” in Jadaliyya along with the zine that goes with it. We're also linking to work from the Palestinian Feminist Collective on sophicide, Devin Atallah's article "Beyond Grief," the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition website, and a report on the politics of the IHRA definition from scholar Jamie Stern-Weiner.

Lara Friedman, Foundation for Middle East Peace

Amira Jarmakani, San Diego State University

Emmaia Gelman, Sarah Lawrence College

In this episode, Jessie Daniels and Kim-Hong Nguyen ask Melissa Weiner about her work exploring the affective ties that the Zionist project generates through Birthright trips and summer camps and how these ties become imbricated within heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism.

“The Blue Box” - documentary

https://www.norma.co.il/blue-box/

https://www.cineaste.com/winter2023/blue-box

“Birthright Israel and #MeToo”

https://jewishcurrents.org/birthright-israel-and-metoo

Dr. Ruth, Sniper

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/dr-ruth-sniper

“How Broadway Helped the Zionist Revolt Against Britain”

https://newlinesmag.com/essays/how-broadway-helped-the-zionist-revolt-against-britain/

In the fourth episode of "The Trouble with White Feminism" series, Kim-Hong Nguyen talks to Jessie Daniels, author of Nice White Ladies, about white ladies celebrities. They unpack why white Jewish celebrities like Debra Messing, Amy Schumer, and Sheryl Sandberg stake a claim on their brand of feminism in service of Zionism.

Daniels, Jessie. Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role In It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It (Seal Press, 2021). https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/jessie-daniels/nice-white-ladies/9781541675865/

In this special episode, we share a talk on a new (really!) right-wing attack on Palestine-related organizations: a U.S. federal "anti-terror" bill that would strip progressive organizations of their ability to function, and wouldn't require scrutiny or due process. Legal scholar Darryl Li and policy expert Lara Friedman discuss the new legislation and its relationship to the avalanche of new proposed "anti-antisemitism" bills currently before Congress.

This conversation rests on Darryl Li’s recent report “Anti-Palestinian at the Core: The Origins and Growing Dangers of U.S. Antiterrorism Law”, published by Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Lara Friedman’s most recent legislative round-up which she publishes at the Foundation for Middle East Peace website.

This episode, with Miriam Osman of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), goes right to the heart of the matter. We’re unpacking Zionism and anti-Zionism as keywords for Critical Zionism Studies, as we talk over Palestinian historical writing about Zionist colonialism. We discuss how understanding Zionism as a project of various powers — states, empires, and capital — is essential for defining anti-Zionism. Our conversation draws on Fayez Sayegh and Faris Glubb’s work on British and Nazi interest in Zionist colonization, then turns to the role of the United States. Miriam also explains PYM’s approach to political education about Zionism and anti-Zionism, and the importance of centering anti-imperialism.

Fayez Sayegh

Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Palestine Research Center, 1965)

https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC12_scans/12.zionist.colonialism.palestine.1965.pdf

L. Allday and S. Al-Saleh

Zionism as a Fascist Ideology and Movement: Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany by Faris Yahya Glubb (Liberated Texts, Oct 2023)

https://liberatedtexts.com/reviews/zionism-as-a-fascist-ideology-zionist-relations-with-nazi-germany-by-faris-glubb/

You can find the transcript on our website criticalzionismstudies.org

Today's guest is Jamal Nablusi, a diaspora Palestinian writer, researcher, and organizer. And the term he is helping us unpack in this episode is “Indigenous sovereignty.” In 2023, Jamal published an article called “Reclaiming Palestinian Indigenous Sovereignty” in the Journal of Palestine Studies, and that's the text that's guiding our conversation today. This interview was recorded in early September 2024, before Israel’s invasion of and attacks on Lebanon.

​Dr Jamal Nabulsi is a diaspora Palestinian writer, researcher and organiser, living as a settler on Yuggera and Turrbal land. He currently works at the University of Melbourne, while holding research grants from the Antipode Foundation, the Institute of Human Geography, and the European International Studies Association. He is a Founding Collective Member of the Institute for Collaborative Race Research, a Global Indigenous Member of the Centre for Global Indigenous Futures at Macquarie University, as well as a member of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. His academic work has received international awards such as the 2024 British International Studies Association Colonial, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Paper Prize.

Today’s episode is a double release with Nothing Never Happens – A Radical Pedagogy Podcast. In conversation with Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether, Unpacking Zionism co-hosts Yulia Gilich and Emmaia Gelman discuss ICSZ’s vision of producing resistive critical knowledge about Zionism in service of the movement for Palestinian liberation and with the explicit commitment to dismantling Zionism and colonialism.

Coalition to End Zionist Repression

Toolkit: Demand “NO IHRA”

Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism

Fayez Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Palestine Research Center, 1965)

ZINE: C. Heike Schotten, TERFism, Zionism, and Right-Wing Annihilationism

You can find more resources on our website criticalzionismstudies.org.

In the first episode of our special mini-series "The Trouble with White Feminism," host Jessie Daniels interviews Randa Tawil about the ways that white feminism serves the Zionist project.

Randa Tawil is an Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Texas Christian University and a fellow at the American Council of Learned Societies. Tawil is also a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective.

Resources:

Tawil, Randa. "A" Flying Carpet to Doom": Retracing Gender and Orientalism through the Transnational Journeys of a Syrian Migrant Woman, 1912–1949." Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 43, no. 1 (2022): 120-144. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/846735

Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide, by Elyse Semerdjian (Stanford University Press, 2023). https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=29963

Tawil, Randa. Race in Transit: Mobilities between Syria and U.S. Empire (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).

The Trouble with White Feminism is a special mini-series presented by writer, professor, and member of the founding collective of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism Jessie Daniels. Across five episodes, Daniels and her colleagues will discuss how white feminism overlaps and intersects with Zionism. This series will help make sense of the present moment when reports of sexual assault are being weaponized to justify Zionist genocidal violence.

Tune is for the first episode of The Trouble with White Feminism on December 2, 2024.

https://criticalzionismstudies.org

Today’s guest is Palestinian filmmaker and writer Azza El Hassan and the keyword we are discussing is “visual remains.” This term refers to Palestinian photographs and films that have survived Israeli plunder, looting, and destruction. By recovering, collecting, and restoring visual remains, El Hassan grapples with the violent past and present in the search for a new visual experience emerging out of the ruins of Zionist colonial violence.

Resources:

Azza El Hassan “Working with Visual Remains”

The Afterlife of Palestinian Images: Visual Remains and the Archive of Disappearance

The Void Project

Azza El Hassan's films

Introducing the new weekly podcast "Unpacking Zionism." It will feature conversations with scholars, activists, and artists about their insights into Zionism. Whether you're an activist or an academic, whether you're new to these conversations, or you've been thinking about this for a while, we're making this podcast for you.

To learn more about the Institute and to access episode notes and transcripts, visit our website criticalzionismstudies.org. And please subscribe to "Unpacking Zionism" so you never miss new episodes.

This week we’re looking at Islamophobia as a keyword for Critical Zionism Studies. But it’s necessarily also about anti-Palestinian racism and DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion. This is a special episode — rather than an interview, we’re bringing you leading thinkers and educators in conversation. We’re joined by Evelyn Alsultany, Nadine Naber, Nina Mehta, and ICSZ collective member Amira Jarmakani. This talk is called “Oh… and Islamophobia!” It was organized by ICSZ as part of the launch of the Coalition to End Zionist Repression, which is at bit.ly/campus-alliance.

This talk was recorded on Oct. 16, 2024.

Speakers:

Evelyn Alsultany, University of Southern California

Nina Mehta, PARCEO

Nadine Naber, University of Illinois - Chicago

Moderator:

Amira Jarmakani, San Diego State University

Presented by the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism

(criticalzionismstudies.org)

as a launch calendar event of the Coalition to End Zionist Repression

(righttorejectzionism.org)

See the full calendar here: bit.ly/campus-alliance

Links shared:

Information:

- decolonizepalestine.com/rainbow-washing/faithwashing

- uscpr.org/activist-resource/fighting-faithwashing-and-islamophobia/

Curriculum/training resources:

- project48.com/curriculum-overview

- antisemitismcurriculum.org

DEI training resource:

- parceo.org

Today’s special episode is a recording of the launch of the inaugural issue of the Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism (JCSZ). Our guest speakers, Diana Buttu and Robin D.G. Kelley, reflect on the devastation wrought by Zionism over the past year and the past century. We asked Diana and Robin to help us think through the question of how Zionist historiography and memorialization of October 7 is used to gin up anti-Palestinian racism, justify this latest chapter of the Nakba, and rationalize colonial violence.

We recorded this event before the US presidential elections so it does not come up all that much in the conversation. Except, Diana and Robin both highlighted the importance of the Critical Study of Zionism as a necessary tool of the anti-Zionist, anti-colonial struggle and that struggle continues no matter which genocide supporter was ultimately elected president of the United States.

Video recording of the launch is available here.

This conversation with Sophia Azeb is the third and last (at least for now) episode in our mini-series about “future” as a keyword in Critical Zionism Studies. We talk about Palestinian futurity and its entanglement with Palestinian history and memory of the past.

Sophia Azeb (she/they) is an assistant professor of Black Studies in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sophia's current book project, Another Country: Translational Blackness and the Afro-Arab, explores the currents of transnational and translational blackness charted by African American, Afro-Caribbean, African, and Afro-Arab peoples across twentieth century North Africa and Europe. Prior to joining the faculty at UC Santa Cruz, Sophia was a member of the faculty collective that founded the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Sophia is a frequent contributor to The Funambulist platform.

Sophia Azeb, “Who Will We Be When We Are Free? On Palestine and Futurity”

Sophia Azeb, “The “no-state Solution”: Decolonizing Palestine Beyond the West Bank and East-Jerusalem”

Funambulist podcast with Sophia Azeb, “The “No-State Solution”: Power of Imagination for the Palestinian Struggle”

Funambulist podcast with Sophia Azeb, “A Moment of True Decolonization”

Workshops4Gaza - Sophia Azeb’s workshop “Black Studies and the Black Radical tradition,” Nov 3, 4-7pm PST on Zoom.

In this episode, we talk with Jennifer Mogannam about “refugees” as a keyword for thinking about Zionism. Our conversation considers how Palestinian refugee resistance to the condition of Zionist colonization permeates culture, community, politics, and sense of the future — not only for Palestinians but for everyone — and how that resistance poses a major challenge to the narratives that Zionism relies on.

You can read the transcript of this episode and the forum we discuss, "Locating Palestinians at the Intersections: Indigeneity, Critical Refugee Studies, and Decolonization" by Jennifer Mogannam, Eman Ghanayem, and Rana Sharif on our website.

In this episode, we invited Arun Kundnani, a member of the founding collective of the Institute, to talk about the idea of terror and how it relates to Zionism.

Arun is a writer and a thinker whose work is on race and racial capitalism, Islamophobia, surveillance, political violence, and radicalism. Arun wrote a recent article “Israel, US campuses, and the fragility of the coloniser” that is published in the New Arab. Arun also wrote a book called The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror.

You can find transcript and episode notes on our website criticalzionismstudies.org

In this episode, founders of DecolonizePalestine.com Rawan Masri and Fathi Nimer discuss abolition as a keyword in Critical Zionism Studies. In June 2023, Rawan and Fathi published an article titled “Imprisoning Palestine: Zionist Colonialism through an Abolitionist Lens” in the Scalawag magazine. This piece connects abolition and decolonization by highlighting the centrality of carceral and punitive systems and structures to how Zionist settler colonialism operates.

We recorded this conversation in September 2024, but it may be even more pressing now, since two weeks ago, on October 15th, 2024, the United States and Canada sanctioned and blacklisted the Palestinian prisoner support network Samidoun. The abolitionist lens that Rawan and Fathi offer us in their piece demonstrates that these attacks on and repression of organizations dedicated to Palestinian prisoner support are not isolated incidents, but a very obvious extension of those carceral and punitive systems that Zionism requires to function.

Resources:

DecolonizePalestine.com

Rawan Masri and Fathi Nimer, “Imprisoning Palestine: Zionist Colonialism through an Abolitionist Lens” in Scalawag

Myth: Palestinians Fake their Own Atrocities (Pallywood)

In this episode, Pranay Somayajula helps us unpack the term hindutva as a keyword in Critical Zionism Studies. Hindutva is a strain of ethnic supremacy and Indian nationalism that Pranay will help us unpack in the episode. It is specifically anti-Muslim, and – like Zionism – it has been fueled by British colonialism. In the present, Hindutva is more and more entwined with Zionist politics. In our conversation, Pranay untangles hindutva’s parallels and connections to Nazism and to Zionism.

In fact, this episode covers a lot of ground - we discuss the close military, political, and diplomatic relationship between India and Israel, the ideological underpinnings of the two countries’ nationalist regimes, the growing alignment of Hindu American organizations with the Israel lobby groups, and the solidarity and collaborations between anti-Hindutva and anti-Zionist organizers.

Pranay Somayajula is an Indian-American writer and organizer, based in Washington, DC, who currently serves as Organizing and Advocacy Director for Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR). Pranay recently completed a MSc in Human Rights from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where his dissertation research focused on preventive detention and the legacies of colonial rule in postcolonial India. Prior to studying at LSE, Pranay worked at HfHR as Advocacy and Outreach Coordinator. He received his B.A. in Political Science and International Affairs in 2022 from the George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs.

Today, we are sharing a lot of resources so our listeners can dive into this topic much deeper:

• Vijay Prashad’s article “How the Hindus became Jews”
• Pranay Somayajula’s senior thesis at George Washington University “The ‘Hindu Rashtra’ and the ‘Jewish State’: the Ideological Foundations of Ethnic Democracy in India and Israel”
• Pranay’s more recent essay called “we are all palestinians: notes on solidarity and collective resistance”
• Aparna Gopalan’sarticle, “THE HINDU NATIONALISTS USING THE PRO-ISRAEL PLAYBOOK” published in the Jewish Currents in 2023
• ICSZ Battling the IHRA Definition Podcast

This episode with Eli Meyerhoff looks at “antisemitism training” as a keyword for Critical Zionism Studies. Eli Meyerhoff is a fellow at the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, which is part of the American Association of University Professors.

Last week's episode is related to this conversation — that one is about tacking anti-Islamophobia messages onto discussions of antisemitism — as in we’re worried about antisemitism… oh, and Islamophobia. So make sure to listen to both.

Links:

Eli Meyerhoff, Unmasking Indoctrination (Duke Chronicle 6/26/24) https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2024/06/062624-meyerhoff-unmasking-indoctrination

Costs of War Project https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/

DropHillel.org

PARCEO: antisemitismcurriculum.org

For this episode, we invited Sara Kershnar to unpack antisemitism as one of the keywords in Critical Zionism Studies. In October 2023, Sara spoke at the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism's inaugural conference about Israel, U.S. white nationalism, and transnational right-wing alliances and you can view Sara’s talk on our website. In today’s conversation, we will pull on some of the threads Sara introduced in that talk, including why it is hard and contentions to define antisemitism, how accusations of antisemitism are weaponized to advance Zionist politics, and how Zionism is inherently antisemitic.

Sara Kershnar is the co-founder and international coordinator of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network established in 2007. Sara began her Palestinian solidarity work during the second intifada. Sara is also a co-founder of Generation FIVE, an organization working on transformative justice approaches to addressing child sexual abuse and works towards prison abolition in solidarity with currently and formerly-incarcerated people. After her father tested positive for HIV, Sara began her organizing and social justice work in the movements to reduce drug-related harm. Sara is the queer mother of a fabulous nine-year old. Sara has coordinated and been a lead writer on several publications including the The Business of Backlash: The Attack on the Palestinian Movement and Other Movements for Social Justice; Israel’s Worldwide Role in Repression focused on the role of Israel’s government, its military, and related corporations and organizations in a global industry of violence and repression; Greenwashing Apartheid: The Jewish National Fund’s Environmental Cover Up – an eBook; and was a producer of a documentary film, “Enduring Roots: Over a Century of Resistance to the JewishNational Fund.” Sara has also published several articles on reducing drug-related harm and a manual on implementing transformative justice approaches to child sexual abuse.

Welcome to Battling the IHRA Definition, a new podcast by the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. This trailer is a quick introduction into “the IHRA definition of antisemitism,” which has been weaponized by Zionist institutions and policymakers to equate criticizing Israel with antisemitism and equate Zionism with Jewishness. The IHRA definition is a tactic used by political actors — particularly the right — to obscure Zionist politics, paper over US and other imperial interests in dominating Palestine, and to attack the anti-genocide movement.

The IHRA definition has been adopted by institutions and corporations, used by media outlets, and become a widely-used talking point for smearing anti-Zionists, Palestinians, educators, human rights advocates, and more. And as popular resistance has grown for Palestine – popular resistance against Zionism – the IHRA definition is being used as a tool to attack it from many angles.

And that’s why we are Battling the IHRA Definition. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss new episodes.

In this episode, we talk with Nayrouz Abu Hatoum about “future” as a keyword in Critical Zionism Studies. This conversation demonstrates that despite the violence that the Israeli state inflicts on Palestinian daily life, violence that affects their ability to imagine and predict the future, Palestinian struggle for liberation is always already future-oriented.

Nayrouz Abu Hatoum is associate professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Concordia University. She was the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University for 2018/2019, and is a co-founding member of Insaniyyat: Society of Palestinian Anthropologists. Her research explores visual politics in Palestine and focuses on alternative imaginations, peoples' place-making and dwelling practices in contexts of settler colonialism. Currently, she is working on her ethnographic project that examines the politics of visual arts production and its role in expanding Palestinians' imagination.

This episode is the first in a short series of conversations about future and how central it is to the Palestinian liberation struggle, to the anti-Zionist struggle, and in fact, to all anti-imperialist, decolonial, abolitionist, liberatory struggles.

You can read the transcript of this episode and the article we discuss, "Decolonizing [in the] future: Scenes of Palestinian temporality" by Nayrouz Abu Hatoum, on our website.

This is part 2 of our ongoing mini-series on “future” as a keyword in Critical Zionism Studies. We talk to Eman Abdelhadi who explains that every liberation struggle is ultimately a struggle for a different future, one that rebels against the unjust present and past.

Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, activist and writer who thinks at the intersection of gender, sexuality, religion, and politics. She is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, where she researches American Muslim communities. She is co-author of "Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072," a sci-fi novel published in 2022 with Common Notions Press. Her academic work has been published in numerous sociology journals and covered by press outlets such as the Washington Post, Associated Press, and NPR. Her public writing has appeared in In These Times, Jacobin, Truthout and other outlets. She is based in Chicago, where she is also a community organizer with the Salon Kawakib Collective, Faculty for Justice in Palestine and other formations.

Eman and her co-author M. E. O'Brien wrote a speculative novel about a liberated future called Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072. Eman and M. E. also published a short story that is a continuation of the novel. The story is called “Sharaner Maash, or a haunting from the time before.” And in the episode, we mention a Truthout podcast “Palestine Solidarity Encampments Are a Rehearsal for Liberatory Self-Governance” that Eman was recently on.

“Reclaiming Knowledge Production, Resisting Zionist Enclosures” is a recording of a panel discussion among scholars, organizers, and faculty labor leaders who are resisting Israel’s genocide of Palestinian in Gaza and also resisting the upsurging forces of intellectual and cultural repression in the US. The panel is moderated by Black studies scholar and ICSZ collective member Dylan Rodriguez, with brilliant talks from Heather Ferguson, Pranav Jani, Aaron Kirshenbaum, and Karim Mattar.

We’re also really proud to announce that with this talk, we kick off the Coalition to End Zionist Repression — and its first campaign, called the Right to Reject Zionism. The coalition is a powerful new US-wide effort that brings together the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism with Palestine Legal, the National Lawyers Guild, the Palestinian Youth Movement, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, National Students for Justice in Palestine, National Faculty for Justice in Palestine, Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC), and more. We’re working within the Campus & Academia Alliance within that coalition. You can find resources and events online at bit.ly/campus-alliance

0:09 - Intro

5:44 - Opening remarks by Dylan Rodriguez, UC Riverside Center for Ideas & Society, Decolonizing Humanism (?) Programming Stream

9:48 - Heather Ferguson, AAUP AFT Local 6741

16:12 - Pranav Jani, FSJP & Advisor, SJP-Ohio State Univ. & President, AAUP OSU

30:38 - Aaron Kirshenbaum, Drop Hillel & Judaism On Our Own Terms (JOOOT)

43:48 - Karim Mattar, MLA Members for Justice in Palestine & Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network

55:43 - Q&A

1:20:58 - Closing remarks

1:29:15 - Outro

Resources:

Coalition to End Zionist Repression and its inaugural campaign the Right to Reject Zionism

Adalah resource on megadonors

Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism "No IHRA" toolkit

OSU Jews for Palestine

Drop Hillel

MLA Proposed Resolution 2025-1 –

Linguistics for Domination, Michel DeGraff

Tracking repression on campuses since August 2024

Mondoweiss on repression on campuses since August 2024

AAUP-organized National Day of Action for Higher Ed

Today we are sharing the first episode of our new podcast Battling the IHRA Definition.

You will hear from Christine Hong, speaking at our October 2023 conference titled “Battling the IHRA Definition: Theory and Activism.” Christine Hong is a founding collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and a professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her talk is titled Securitizing California’s Ethnic Studies.

Check out our website, criticalzionismstudies.org, to access the transcript and a video recording of this talk, as well as many more conference videos, transcripts, and papers, with new materials being regularly added. You can also find more resources about the IHRA definition and how to resist it.

This episode with Dylan Rodriguez takes a look at the Stop Asian Hate campaign, and some of the organizations behind it, as a way to consider hate as a keyword for Critical Zionism Studies. This is also the first of several episodes we hope to bring you where we’ll talk about the intersections of Asian and AAPI politics, in the US and globally, as they intersect with Zionist politics.

Dylan’s article, which is the basis of this conversation, is called “How the Stop Asian Hate Movement Became Entwined with Zionism, Policing, and Counterinsurgency.” It’s on the website of the Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, and on our website.

In the fifth and final episode of “The Trouble with White Feminism” series, Jessie Daniels talks to ICSZ founding collective member Lara Sheehi about maintaining clarity about the material reality of Zionist settler colonialism while resisting psycho-affective tactics that Zionists use to unsettle us.

Sheehi, Lara, and Stephen Sheehi. Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine. Routledge, 2021.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780429487880/psychoanalysis-occupation-lara-sheehi-stephen-sheehi

Sheehi, Stephen. "Psychoanalysis under occupation: Nonviolence and dialogue initiatives as a psychic extension of the closure system." Psychoanalysis and History 20, no. 3 (2018): 353-369.

Stovall, Natasha. “Whiteness on the Couch,” Longreads, 12 August 2019.

https://longreads.com/2019/08/12/whiteness-on-the-couch/

The Zionist playbook is literally this

Hasbara Handbook: https://www.middle-east-info.org/take/wujshasbara.pdf

Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack, The Race to Innocence: Confronting Hierarchical Relations among Women, 1 J. Gender Race & Just. 335 (1998), available at https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/faculty_articles/274.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang: "Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor," Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

Wekker, Gloria. White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. (2016). Duke: Durham, NC. https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/86/White-InnocenceParadoxes-of-Colonialism-and-Race

In this episode, we are joined by Sai Englert to discuss settler colonialism as a keyword in Critical Zionism Studies. Sai’s work considers the role of labor in the settler colonial conquest of land and accumulation of resources, and its particular importance to the Zionist project. This conversation explores the logics and contradictions of settler colonialism, and Sai makes a compelling case for paying closer attention to exploitation as a key structure of Zionism.

Sai Englert is a lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands and the author of Settler Colonialism and Introduction. This conversation is grounded in his most recent article, “Gaza and Settler Colonialism” in Spectre, from that journal’s April 2024, special issue on Palestine. Sai and Spectre have generously shared his article for podcast listeners. It is available on our website and through the show notes.

In the third episode of "The Trouble with White Feminism" series, Jessie Daniels interviews Kim-Hong Nguyen, professor at University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada, and author of Mean Girl Feminism: How White Feminists Gaslight, Gatekeep, and Girlboss (University of Illinois Press, 2024). This conversation takes us through the IHRA definition of antisemitism - which has been discussed here on the podcast before - and connects it to other forms of “supremacism,” including white imperial feminism.

Nguyen, Kim Hong. Mean Girl Feminism: How White Feminists Gaslight, Gatekeep, and Girlboss (University of Illinois Press, 2024). https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p087684

Nguyen, Kim Hong. "Contemporary Fascism’s de-Judified Homo Sacer." Cultural Politics 11, no. 3 (2015): 315-328. https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article/11/3/315/25823/Contemporary-Fascism-s-de-Judified-Homo-Sacer

International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, working definition of antisemitism

https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism

Kenneth Stern, one of the drafters of this definition, with regrets about it (from 2019):

“I drafted the definition of antisemitism. Rightwing Jews are weaponizing it.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/13/antisemitism-executive-order-trump-chilling-effect

In this episode, we invited Amira Jarmakani and Sean Malloy to talk about DEI, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, as a crucial term to unpack in order to understand how Zionist politics are working.

Amira Jarmakani is a professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and affiliated faculty with the Center for Islamic and Arabic Studies and LGBTQ Plus Studies at San Diego State University. And most importantly, Amira is on the advisory board of our very own Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Sean L. Molloy is a professor of history and critical race and ethnic studies at the University of California, Merced. And Sean is also, most importantly, a collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.

This conversation builds on Amira’s talk From “Zionism is racism” to “antisemitism is racism” Sean’s talk From the “New Antisemitism” to the IHRA: The Evolution of Zionist Countermobilization that they presented at the Institute’s conference Battling the IHRA Definition: Theory and Activism in October 2023. During the interview, Amira also mentions a Vox article “How Republicans are weaponizing antisemitism to take down DEI.” And last, Sean’s article titled “A Safe Space for Apartheid, Zionist Organizations, and the Counter Mobilization Against Palestinian Solidarity on U.S. Campuses,” is coming out very shortly in the Critical Ethnic Studies Journal and we will post it when it’s out.

You can find the transcript and episode notes on our website criticalzionismstudies.org

In this episode I’m talking with Hussein Omar, who is a writer from Cairo currently based in New York City. After completing doctoral research on anticolonial political ideas in the Arab world he’s now writing a five hundred year history of Egypt as told through its cemeteries. He also writes about sexuality, aesthetics and psychoanalysis, and he organizes with Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG). Hussein’s recent essay titled Homo Zion: How Pinkwashing Erases Colonial History, is in Parapraxis Magazine. Expanding our thinking beyond the usual rejoinders to pinkwashing claims, this essay pushes us ask what it is about us that makes pinkwashing a workable tactic.

Additional resources for this conversation:

Christina Hanhardt, Safe Space (2017)

Kramer, Report from the Holocaust (1990)

Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct (1997)

Al Qaws, Beyond Propaganda: Pinkwashing as Colonial Violence (2020)

This episode with philosopher John Harfouch considers “propaganda” as a keyword for Critical Zionism Studies. We’re looking at the work of Fayez Sayegh — the incredibly prolific Palestinian-Syrian-American scholar who was instrumental in theorizing Zionism and defining Arab American politics. Dr. Harfouch walks us through Sayegh’s studies of how Zionism works as a colonial process in Palestine and as a system of politics and messaging in the United States.

Syllabus: Philosophical Approaches to the Question of Palestine (American Philosophical Association)

https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.apaonline.org/resource/resmgr/inclusiveness_syllabi/inclusiveness_syllabi_2/philosophical_approaches_to_.pdf

Fayez Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Palestine Research Center, 1965)

https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC12_scans/12.zionist.colonialism.palestine.1965.pdf

Fayez Sayegh, “A Strange Concept of Reward and Punishment” (The Caravan, Mar. 26 1959) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ituULMZPUkHZzhug3ylQHunksB7euOze/view?usp=drive_link

John Harfouch's diagram of the Zionist movement as theorized by Sayegh https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j4JLKC62xVHJnUrj5h_M8bfZkl_3A4Qx/view

There’s another Unpacking Zionism episode on the work of Fayez Sayegh: Zionism and anti-Zionism with Miriam Osman.

For this first episode, we have three guests and we're excited to launch the podcast in conversation with Rabab Abdulhadi, Lara Kiswani, and Dylan Rodriguez. We discuss what Critical Zionism Studies is and what it can offer us in this moment.

To learn more about the Institute and to access episode notes and transcripts, visit our website criticalzionismstudies.org. And please subscribe to "Unpacking Zionism" so you never miss new episodes.