Princeton UNIVERSITY

4 April 2025

9:30 AM Welcome: Tom Hare (COM), Josh Guild (AAS)

Introductory Remarks: Max Weiss

Panel One: 10 - 11:30 AM

Esmat Elhalaby (Toronto), “Zionism’s Third World”

Joel Beinin (Stanford), “Matzpen and the Problem of Being ‘Correct’”

Chair: Gyan Prakash (History)

Panel Two: 11:45 AM - 1:15 PM

Maura Finkelstein (independent scholar), “Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Hillel International”

Raz Segal (Stockton), “The Holocaust in Anti-Zionist Thought and Politics”

Chair: Ikaika Ramones (Anthropology)

Lunch 1:15 - 2:30 PM

Panel Three 2:45 PM - 4:15 PM

Sahar Aziz (Rutgers Law School), “The Antisemitism of Essentializing Jews in Anti-Discrimination Law”

Marina Magloire (Emory), “Black Feminist Anti-Zionism and the Practice of Home”

    Chair: Dan-El Padilla Peralta (Classics)

Panel Six 4:30 - 6 PM

Ammiel Alcalay (CUNY Graduate Center/Queens College), ““What Can Be Brought Forth to This Present”

Saree Makdisi (UCLA), “There is Only Palestine”

Chair: Max Weiss (History)

Concluding Discussion: 6 PM

PARTICIPANT BIOGRAPHIES

Ammiel Alcalay

Poet, novelist, translator, critic, and scholar, Ammiel Alcalay is the author or co-author of over thirty books, including a little history, Islanders, Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1999; Faraj Bayrakdar’s A Dove in Free Flight, co-edited and co-translated with Shareah Taleghani, and After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture.

Recent books include CONTROLLED DEMOLITION: a work in four books; Nasser Rabah’s Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece, co-translated with Khaled al-Hilli and Emna Zghal; and a forthcoming book of essays Follow the Person: Archival Encounters. While bringing works from other parts of the world to the US via translation and advocacy, Alcalay has also helped reconfigure contemporary US literary and cultural history through his unique publishing, pedagogical, and public project, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, recognized in 2017 with a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award.

At Queens College, CUNY, he is former chair of the Department of Classical, Middle Eastern & Asian Languages & Cultures, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation. At the Graduate Center, Alcalay is a member of the faculties in Africana Studies, American Studies, Biography & Memoir Studies, Comparative Literature, English, Medieval Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies. He was named Distinguished Professor in 2023.

Sahar Aziz

Sahar Aziz's scholarship examines the intersection of national security, race, religion, and civil rights with a focus on the adverse impact of national security laws and policies on racial, religious, and ethnic minorities. She is the author of "The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom" and co-editor of "Global Islamophobia and the Rise of Populism." She also serves as the founding director of the Center for Security, Race and Rights. Professor Aziz is a recipient of the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Association of American Law Schools and was named a Middle Eastern and North African American National Security and Foreign Policy Next Generation Leader by New America in 2020 and a Soros Equality Fellow in 2021.

Joel Beinin

Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Emeritus at Stanford University. He taught Middle East history at Stanford University in 1983-2006 and 2008-2019 and directed the Middle East Studies Program at the American University in Cairo in 2006-08. His books on Israel/Palestine include: The Independent Left in Israel, 1967-1993: A Collection in Memory of Noam Kaminer [in Hebrew] (November Books, 2019), co-edited with Carmel Kaminer, Matan Kaminer, Smadar Nehab Kaminer, and others; The Struggle for Sovereignty: Palestine and Israel, 1993-2005 (Stanford University Press, 2006); co-edited with Rebecca L. Stein; Was the Red Flag Flying There? Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel, 1948-1965 (University of California Press, 1990); and Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation (South End Press, 1989), co-edited with Zachary Lockman.

Esmat Elhalaby

Esmat Elhalaby is an Assistant Professor of Transnational History at the University of Toronto. His work focuses principally on colonial and anti-colonial ideas from the nineteenth century to the present. His first book, Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization, is forthcoming from the University of California Press in September 2025.  

Maura Finkelstein

Maura Finkelstein is a writer, ethnographer, and associate professor of anthropology. She is the author of The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai, published by Duke University Press in 2019. Her writing has also been published in Anthropological Quarterly, City and Society, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology Now, Post45, Electric Literature, Allegra Lab, Red Pepper Magazine, The Markaz Review, the Scottish Left Review, Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye, and Al Jazeera.

Marina Magloire

Marina Magloire is a writer and scholar at the intersection of Black feminism and memory work. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Emory University. Her first book, We Pursue Our Magic: A Spiritual History of Black Feminism (UNC Press 2023), won the National Women's Studies Association's Gloria E. Anzaldúa award for significant multicultural feminist contributions to Women of Color/transnational scholarship. Her next book project explores the political uses of archives.

Saree Makdisi

Saree Makdisi is professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA.  His most recent book is Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial (University of California Press, 2022). 

Raz Segal

Raz Segal is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University, where he also serves as the director of the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and founding coordinator of the Refugee Studies Initiative. He was a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (2023) and a recipient of the Baron Velge Award for his work on the history of World War II (2024). His publications include Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2016), and he is at work on a book on the distortion, weaponization, and mobilization of Holocaust history in the reproduction of white supremacy and state violence, including a focus on Israel’s assault on Palestinians from the 1948 Nakba to the current genocidal assault on Gaza. 

Max Weiss

Max Weiss is an intellectual and cultural historian of the modern Middle East, a literary translator from the Arabic, and Professor of History at Princeton University, where he is also Associated Faculty in Comparative Literature. Most recently he is the author of Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Ba`thist Syria (Stanford University Press, 2022), the co-editor of Arabic Thought Against the Liberal Age: Towards a History of the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2018),and the translator of Alawiya Sobh’s This Thing Called Love (Seagull, 2023).