This podcast is a dual release between Nothing Never Happens and The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism’s “Unpacking Zionism” podcast.

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How have the norms of mainstream educational institutions shaped how teachers and students can study and talk about Zionism? What does it mean to study Zionism critically? What does the current moment -- fourteen months into an ongoing genocide of Palestinians, when global solidarity movements persist in the face of extreme repression -- require of radical pedagogues? What knowledge, tools, and legacies of struggle should we turn to for guidance?

In this dual-release episode, Tina and Lucia interview two founding collective members of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ), Dr. Emmaia Gelman and Dr. Yulia Gilich. The Institute examines the political and ideological work of Zionist institutions within and beyond their direct advocacy for Israel. Our conversation includes the genesis of ICSZ and its interventions into institutional norms around the study of Zionism, the creation of their No IHRA Toolkit (in response to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism), the weaponization of antisemitism through definitions and other repressive means, and examples of creative and critical pedagogies investigating Zionism in higher education classes. 

More about our guests:

Emmaia Gelman has taught at NYU and Sarah Lawrence College. She researches the history of ideas about race, queerness, safety, and rights, and their production as political levers in the realm of hate crimes policy, surveillance, anti-terror measures, and war. Emmaia is at work on a critical history of the Anti-Defamation League (1913-1990). She is the co-chair of the American Studies Association Caucus on Academic and Community Activism, and a longtime activist in New York City on Palestine, policing, antiracism, and queer issues.

Yulia Gilich is a media artist, theorist, and community organizer. They are a founding collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. They received their PhD in Film & Digital Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz where they are currently a lecturer teaching courses at the intersection of critical race and media studies.

CREDITS

Co-produced with the "Unpacking Zionism" podcast team -- thanks especially to Emmaia and Yulia for your back-end editing work!

Co-hosts: Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether

Editor and audio engineer: Aliyah Harris

Summer 2024 Intern: Ella Stuccio

Theme music by Lance Haugen and Aviva and the Flying Penguins

Outro music is "Unnervous" by Akrasis

Support Nothing Never Happens on Patreon!

Practicing Pedagogies of Resistance and Liberation: The Critical Study of Zionism

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Emmaia Gelman, and founding collective member, Dr. Yulia Gilich, who graciously agreed to collaborate with us. The Institute examines the political and ideological work of Zionist institutions, beyond their direct advocacy for Israel. Emmaia Gelman has taught at New York University and Sarah Lawrence College.

Yulia Gilich is a media artist, theorist, and community organizer. They are a founding collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. They received their PhD in film and digital media from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where they are currently a lecturer teaching courses at the intersection of critical race and media studies.

There is so much depth to the work of ICSC and the ways they connect research, organizing, Pedagogies and Activism. Here is our conversation. Emmaia and Yulia, welcome to Nothing Never Happens. We are very excited to have you here today to talk about the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. If you could introduce yourselves and your organization.

And then not just to study it, but to operationalize, make use of that information, make use of that knowledge, because it is also a, as a power structure, it's a way that capital is moved, that people are repressed, that land is taken and organized. And, you know, to sharpen that, it's a colonial and racial, racist, uh, power structure.

So we work both in academia and with organizing and also we want to make really clear that research and knowledge comes from both places.

Yulia: My name is Yulia Gilich. I am a lecturer at UC Santa Cruz and a member of the founding collective of the Institute. And for me, I have arrived at anti Zionism both through scholarship and movement work.

So it's people that we know through the political commitment to collective liberation. And, just the production of research and knowledge in service of the movement.

Who's been part of that movement understands about it. So, you know, lies that it's violent lies that it's anti Semitic, et cetera. That makes it really clear that we need this kind of space to protect talking about Zionism and study of Zionism and trying to actually figure out what's going on and telling the truth about it, that we need to protect it from.

At the same time, over the last bunch of decades, there's been a really concerted effort by Zionist and right wing and pro Israel funders to create Zionist knowledge, to create departments that say they're Jewish studies and Israel studies, but actually they're Zionist Jewish studies and Zionist Israel studies, and become part of the sort of structure of what kind of knowledge and research universities validate.

So we don't have many resources going in the other direction. So we decided to create the Institute because we need institutions. We need institutions that are anti Zionist and that can protect us and and gather us and advance our work. That's the origins of the Institute, the decades really leading up to this.

So I, I feel it quite personally.

Lucia: Thank you so much for those. that, that really helpful kind of framing of who you are and the origins of, of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. I am wondering if you all could expand on something that I think came through in Emmaia, your, your, um, your words just now and Yulia, some of what you said, which is that there has been a study of Zionism happening within many of our institutions of higher education and not just higher education, but that, that study has been coded as a kind of neutral knowledge.

Yulia: I think the departure point is actually naming the fact that Zionist knowledge production is not neutral. And one of the kind of primary intellectual impetus behind the work of the Institute is to decouple the study of Zionism from Jewish study, from Israel study. And as Amaya said, to understand it and study it as an ideology.

So I think that is also something that unites not just critical Zionism studies, but various critical disciplines with movement work, like Black studies, like critical race studies, right? These are fields that have explicit goals and explicit commitments to liberatory practice. right? These are explicitly liberatory fields.

Because if we do understand knowledge as explicitly political, as having political stakes and liberatory goals, then it doesn't matter where we engage in that knowledge in the classroom or outside of it. Movements produce knowledge. Recognizing, engaging with that knowledge and elevating that knowledge.

In order to fight this kind of power structure, we need to understand it. And so this is a long lineage of struggle and of knowledge production that we emerge out of. And on a lot of campuses that saw encampments emerge over the last year, I think that became very clear that the students who were engaged in this really critical and political project of study of power applied those lessons in order to fight their institutions, their administrators, the police that they had called on them.

Um, so this knowledge actually traverses. the confines of the classroom. And that's the goal.

about Zionism, right? So often that entry point where people are just beginning to encounter, it really is political education, even though we're doing it in the classroom, even though we're looking at what are some of the primary sources, what's the historiography, like that actually is the work of political education.

And in fact, it's the work, you know, Palestinian youth movement has undertaken an enormous. Amount of political education in the last year in the context of trying to sort of build the movement and capture the energy that's coming in. There are lots of new people seeing what's going on, seeing the genocide, seeing the total intransigence of the political class and institutional leaders and wanting to get in, right?

So the political education that movement groups. are doing really looks like classroom teaching. And for us, there's something sort of in the other direction, which is in the space of the academy, we have been really encouraged to start from not only zero, but like negative one, every time we start to talk about Zionism, right?

Like is Zionism settler colonialism, or is it not? No, that's done. We've, we've arrived. Zionism is settler colonialism. It announced itself as such. All of its originating leaders announced that they were going to colonize Palestine and they talked about civilizing the barbarians that, you know, it's not, it's not news.

Zionism is a settler colonial racial project. Like the U. S., Israel is a settler colonial state. That will not be debatable in these spaces because if we begin there, we'll never get past it, right? Studying Zionism, its direct work for the Israeli state and its other work, meaning how it operates in the United States, whatever, is politically necessary.

We should, we should look at them because they're primary sources, but we're not looking to them to see if they, you know, do they make sense to us? Like that we're not looking in that direction. So we laid some groundwork. which I think of as political education for academics.

Tina: Yeah, I really appreciate you, your conversation here about inside and outside the classroom where these pedagogical moments occur.

And so with the encampments, can you take us into a classroom that would inform what the pedagogy looks like that is informing the students in the movement and other people in the movement and how that conversation flows?

Emmaia: On my campus, there was not an encampment. The students at Sarah Lawrence, where I was teaching, decided that they would put their energy into other kinds of organizing.

No, we're going to talk about Zionism. That was an incredible opening that encampments made for us through this collective study.

Yulia: Yeah, the encampment was a heterogeneous, a kind of formation with people coming from different fields of study and coming with different tactics and strategies and ideas of how to win and what victory is.

How do we understand our university as directly complicit in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza? Like, what does it actually mean and why is it important for us? in Santa Cruz, California, to be encamped and how does it help anyone in Palestine? Those were the questions that emerged out of this really transnational study of power.

and engaging in a local meaningful fight that is actually materially implicated in what's going on in Palestine. Making those transnational connections was really critical for how those students approached the encampment. And the other thing is that I, I really appreciated that students did not think of the police abolitionist movement or queer struggle as a separate issue.

And I think we also saw the punishment for that kind of work being unequally distributed. And yet, this is what solidified this movement and allowed the students to regroup and come back to school this year, ready to continue the fight. Despite the fact that on our campus, students for justice in Palestine were banned.

for two years. Because they were able to build this really robust movement, they're all ready to continue the fight stronger than they were before.

Lucia: Yeah, I mean, there's something profoundly radicalizing that just exposes the connections of all of these liberation struggles when you're in an encampment and your university sends the police to brutalize, to brutalize you and your, your colleagues and your friends.

So thank you for, thank you for highlighting that. Maybe we can talk a little bit about institutional reactions to the student uprisings. as they have related to the continuation of certain forms of Zionist political education through the mechanisms of university administrations and other kinds of like anti bias, anti anti Semitism trainings, etc.

Like that's the sort of un, unstated subtext. And it's hard not to receive those correspondences as. as warnings to, to not, not step off the institutional line. So I'm given that context. A, I'm curious what y'all have been seeing within the members of your collective in terms of how institutional responses have been more solidified and codified over the summer so that people are navigating new things this year.

Emmaia: real. I mean, there is retaliation awaiting, and the difficulty that we have right now is that it's not just university administrators acting on their own.

There are all these other, you know, organizations outside of universities who are acting on students, they're acting on anti Zionist students, they're acting on faculty who dare to, you know, talk about Zionism and or are actually anti Zionist. They're also acting on Zionist faculty and administrators, advising them, resourcing them, just to name some of what's going on.

There's law fair organizations which have, you know, kajillions of dollars. I think that's the official amount, kajillions, to help design and prosecute both lawsuits, charging civil rights violations, and also Title VI complaints at the Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights, both of which are expensive for schools and time consuming for the people who are involved in them.

So on the one hand, we understand universities as businesses that are trying to manage risk, right? So if it seems like you can avoid several million dollars in legal fees by creating a policy that says, don't say the word Zionist unless you're saying it in a cuddly way. Like maybe you're going to implement that policy.

Those are the pressures that don't even come from within the university, although they certainly play on the profit structure of universities and the fact that university administrators are not necessarily devoted to scholarship, but in fact are business managers often. So how does that work? When people are actually trying to just teach and learn, it's very difficult as you point out.

You can't really say to somebody, well, just go ahead and see how it works. Like, you know, people are going to be attacked. We know it already. We know that there's a ton of surveillance that students have been sort of turned by by outside NGOs, like the Anti-Defamation League into surveillance of their own classrooms.

So it's really, you know, it's tough. It's tough, right? It's, it's dirty and it's tough. The question that you're asking of like, what do we do to support folks? I mean, I think that this is a moment where you have to be forthright, right? Like, this is not a moment for the week of art. You have to decide what kind of protection you need versus what kind of risk you can take in a moment that is really a defining historical moment for the world.

And then you have to sort of look around and see who is available to protect you. So we do actually have law on our side, right? I mean, there are, however bankrupt. The civil rights laws might be. They actually do protect us and they protect speech, political speech. They protect people against being attacked on the basis of their identity, right?

There are also academic freedom organizations weighing in. The AAUP, the American Association of University Professors, which had been under Zionist leadership for a long time and then was sort of reticent about weighing in in a sort of overly political way, has now stepped up to say, like, there's no way to do academic freedom without taking some stance here.

So AAUP has, has statements and guidance. There's also academic labor organizing. Not all academic labor organizations are doing the kind of work that they should be doing to protect their members, but some are really stepping up. And there are synergies. The Coalition to End Zionist Repression is the sort of gathering.

That's our job, right? I want to mention one more resource if I can. There's a brand new campaign called Drop the ADL from Schools. It is a K 12 focused resource. It is organized by teachers, teachers who come from all different sort of perspectives, Muslim teachers, Palestinian teachers, Jewish teachers.

Like, talk, tell, explain it to me like I'm five, right? And they, they do. So I just want to highlight that as a resource for, for teachers who are trying to figure out how to navigate this stuff.

Yulia: I want to echo Emmaus point that we need to organize. We need to protect each other. We need to build power. We need to talk to each other.

There's a graduate student at Cornell who is facing deportation because they were suspended for Palestine solidarity organizing. And also the one tenured professor. who got fired, and Maura Finkelstein was actually technically fired for an Instagram post. So, are you willing to censor and limit what you say, not just in the classroom, but everywhere you go?

Lucia: I wonder if you could draw any lessons from the movements that are ongoing and also previous to stop right wing attacks on education.

I think about in California, the sort of ethnic studies, protecting ethnic studies stuff, the various kinds of various kinds of organizing that teachers have had to do to be able to teach history in their classrooms?

Emmaia: No, there is a, there's so much to be learned from the movement, certainly from the ethnic studies movement, which I'll talk about in one second.

By the, by the sort of neoliberal university model. I think it's really interesting to read their book because. The playbook that they describe, um, that's sort of pioneered by those, that network of organizations is in fact the same playbook that Zionist organizations are using. They create organizations that are not necessarily identifiable as part of that network.

They say that they're advocating for both. for rights, you know, they'll, for their right to participate or their right to be part of campus life, despite the fact that what they're doing is kind of counterfactual. And they pump money into it so that students who need scholarships or who need research funding are attracted to it and then become part of it.

Basically, this is not a conversation about rights. Like we could spend all day responding to charges that we're stifling speech by saying that, you know, somebody shouldn't talk about why climate change isn't real. Let's not have that conversation, right? Instead, let's look at who's funding it. Let's look at what the political agenda is.

that those funders have. Let's look at how the people, the organizations who are instantiating this are connected to larger political movements, and then let's talk about those movements. It turns out that the same strategy works very well, although it's not been pursued enough to, to make clear what Zionist institutions are trying to do as they push into campuses.

So if we start to look at how Zionist institutions are operating on campuses, the ones that come up to the fore are the Academic Engagement Network. which is a consulting organization that is working with hundreds of colleges and universities, advising them on their antisemitism policy, advising them in theory on like DEI and academic freedom.

The Academic Engagement Network is a project of the Israel on Campus Coalition. Its purpose in life is advocacy for Israel, but that's not, you know, sort of created this other organization that says that it's about, you know, campus climate. academic freedom. And then there's another arm of that, I believe, which is faculty against anti Semitism, which suddenly is doing counter work to faculty for justice in Palestine.

We just saw an announcement from the American Jewish Committee, Hillel, the Anti Defamation League, and ACE. They had just gathered 100 plus college presidents for a conference on how are you going to deal with antisemitism. So there, there's a sort of process of creating policy from the top and having it filtered down repressively through campuses.

The thing that I think has been really. sort of effective in destabilizing the argument that Zionist organizations are making against ethnic studies. The argument that they're making is that by including Palestinian voices that are talking about their own colonization by the state of Israel, and by not having a section on Jewish studies in particular, or anti Semitism, that they're marginalizing their mark.

Well, they say it in different ways. Sometimes they say they're marginalizing Jews, and sometimes they say they're marginalizing white students. I think the thing that's been really helpful in that case is to make clear how directly that rationale and even their organizing is connected to the anti critical race theory movement and the white nationalist movement.

Lucia: Yeah, I appreciate how your keyword series has really highlighted that sort of the connections with Christian nationalism, Christian Zionism, Hindutva, and these other kind of right wing ethno nationalist projects that end up fighting themselves on the same boards.

Could you talk about it, what it is, how you utilize it, and how you push back against the pushback that you've talked about?

Emmaia: When we first started out, even before we created the institute, we asked Scholars and activists, what do you need? What do you need this institute to do in order to make space for critical Zionism studies?

Well, we know that's ridiculous because Yulia and I are Jewish and we're not Zionists. Just to use this very small case study, right? Zionism is not self determination for us. Indeed, anti Zionism is self determination for us. And additionally, beyond those examples, the definition is so vague as to be completely useless.

I think it says something like, you know, anti Semitism is hatred of Jewish people. No, no.

Yulia: It is a certain perception of Jews or other people. It is so, it is so nonsensical. It literally means

Lucia: nothing, right? Nothing except for it can be used to, to criminalize

The play is like every time the arguments stop working about Israel, reintroduce antisemitism in a new way and say like, you have to support Israel or you're being anti semitic. It's not, it's not. And so the IRA definition is yet another go at this, but it has been kind of supercharged by the fact that the Palestine Solidarity Movement also represents the anti racist left.

For at a, you know, at a protest where they were accused of violating the IRA definition or defunding universities that are accused of permitting violations of the IRA definition. So it has real, it's become like a real material cudgel. And the thing that's just wild about it is that it, I mean, as we said, like it's so meaningless that if you tried to define anything else in law that way, you would, it would immediately be laughed out of the room.

Lucia: One of the places I might like to go from here is to ask you about, this is kind of circling back to a pedagogy question, but I think you're through your know, our toolkit, which is available and that will link in our show notes and the keyword series that you all are Thank you. putting out through the Unpacking Zionism podcast and the Know IRA podcast that kind of runs run is also one of your, your projects.

And one, one example of this that I, that I was thinking about when you were talking is the sort of rebranding of antisemitism, antisemitism to Jew hate, which you, which there's, I can't remember which, which episode it is, but one of your, one of your guests kind of digs into this. What can you say, and are there specific strategies that you might offer some of our, our listeners around kind of.

Yulia: So as a continuation of the Battling IRA project, one of the things that the Institute is working on right now is a journal that we're about to publish at the end of October.

So that's one resource that we're working on. Another resource within the journal is a micro syllabus and we're hoping to include a micro syllabus around a key word in every issue of the journal, but for the inaugural issue, the term that we're working with is And it's a term that our comrade and colleague Taika Shotten coined, I think, and it's antisemitism industrial complex.

about themes or events or texts, even though we're always grounded in those things, but offering people a very clear and particular entry point through a keyword into the entirety of kind of the discourse around it, I think has been a really useful way to make that knowledge more accessible and hopefully useful.

And if we didn't have that, if that had not been seeded in U. S. conversation, and displaced the kind of conversation about structural racism that we were getting from, you know, studies from the Black Power Movement, then we wouldn't be having this conversation about anti Zionism, anti Semitism right now.

Because the, the ability to erase colonialism from Zionism is absolutely dependent on the idea that you can have a conversation about civil rights without looking at who has power. So when we're thinking about critical study, I actually think You know, if people are coming to this for the first time and trying to get a handle on it, asking that question of like, what is actually the difference between talking about racism and talking about hate?

Like if we can see how that worked, then it becomes much easier to understand how we're being sort of stage managed in the present. So I do think that critical literacy is, is essential. I don't think it starts with Zionism. I think it starts with

Tina: Yeah, I want to echo what Lucia said before. Your podcast is essential, I think, for understanding the panels, the keywords, the resources you have on your website.

Uh, if you could talk about one, the coalition to end Zionist repression and, and tell us a bit about that.

Emmaia: Sure, the Coalition to End Zionist Repression is a U. S. wide effort that includes in it legal organizations, academic organizations, community organizations, student groups, and its purpose is to identify the fact that we're doing two things at once, right?

We're fighting a genocide and then we're fighting the machinery that's stopping us. that that's reinforcing it in the United States and that is standing deliberately in the way of popular movements to stop the genocide. I just want to be super clear. The United States has sent something like 18 billion in weapons to Israel this year in the course of the genocide.

Like we can see very directly how Zionist, Repression is trans, it's like a capital process. It's a material process and it's affecting our lives. In addition to the ways that those of us who try and speak out against it are marginalized and punished, sometimes violently policed, fired, evicted, deported, right?

We've been in a year of absolute emergency and everybody has been running, right, the whole year. And so to be able to talk together, strategize, even learn from each other about what are the forces in play, super important. The coalition has, it is doing what I think is a huge lift of work, which is, it has a incident report form.

that you can fill out on its website. If you've been experiencing an instance of Zionist repression and the coalition will try and sort of match folks with resources to support. And it's also a place for, for sharing knowledge. We have on our launch calendar, which is a Bitly website, bit. ly slash campus dash Alliance.

So that's what the coalition is doing and really it'll do whatever, everybody who joins it. wants it to do. So it's an invitation.

Lucia: Is there anything that we have, before we get to our last, last, last question, is there anything that we have not asked or that has come up that you want to make sure we get on the record, um, before, before we, we move to

Emmaia: I want to ask you guys for a little bit of insight on what's been useful to you.

I mean, I heard you, Tina, say that the podcast was useful to you. I'm curious to understand better how it's working because if we're talking about pedagogy, right, and you're dipping into these resources that are, that are our pedagogy, it would actually be really helpful to learn how you received them and how they fit into what you're experiencing.

Lucia: can say a little bit. I think for me, there, I mentioned before in one of my questions, the feeling of when organizing alongside students, when teaching in my classes, and also in just navigating the sort of volume and gravity of institutional response to that. And, you know, I've worked at two different, I was on, I'm at Brown right now, but I was at Skidmore for a semester last year and that's my normal job.

So I've been in different kinds of institutions with different sort of levels of faculty mobilization and capacity and sort of experience. And so even if I have my kind of toolbox that I carry around with me of like, I know how to, I know how to like cut through and like read the sort of transfer from the language of racism to a language of hate.

Is that, is that a fair definition of astroturfing? So like, I think that some, I think that for me, one of the ways that I've listened and it's not only, this is not the only way, but I find myself listening as a kind of reminder of what I know and the tools that I have so that they feel closer at hand in moments where the kinds of forces we are talking about fighting against and dismantling are up in my face.

But I think what's particularly valuable for me right now is the way that the resources that y'all have collected, kind of bring it all together and assemble a chorus of voices coming from different angles. To clarify, to, yeah, to clarify the sort of multifaceted nature of this struggle. I'll give one example.

So, I'm writing a piece right now about, I was asked to do a, I was asked to do a retrospective on how I'm thinking about the themes of my book, which came out about 18 months ago, now. Um, like, it only came out 18 months ago, like, why are we, why am I having to reflect on it now? But, of course, the only context that I can reflect about it in is, is Israeli genocide.

that runs, runs through Israeli genocide. And so I was trying to sort of think about, think about that and think about what that means now in relation to all these calls for divestment. And I kept, I was writing and I kept using the word, the way that the Mennonite Central Committee talks about its work is working with quote unquote refugees and Palestinian refugees.

If it's not, then maybe they should add it. And then, sure enough, there was, what's the name of the scholar that Renat Vermeulenem, yeah. had a whole conversation about what is the term refugee, what's the political history of the con, the term refugee, how is the UN classified refuge, Palestinian refugees differently from other refugees.

And, um, so I listened to her and I thought, yes, okay. That was like right there. I was, you know, I was, about, you know, a foot from being able to, like, reach that and know it, and now I do. I can, I can, I can speak in a more informed and focused way, even if it's just adding a hyperlink to the piece that I was going to write.

Emmaia: helpful? I absolutely love that story. It's so good to hear. I mean, first of all, The scholars who have been, and the activists who have been on the podcast. I mean, I think of the activists as scholars too, but anyway, everyone who's been on the podcast talking about their, their work, like they do incredibly deep and detailed work and they've also found ways to talk about it in thought supporting ways, generative ways, like the, what you're talking about.

Whenever I do a podcast episode, whenever I do an interview, I always leave absolutely buzzing. Yeah. I love the sort of affirmation that other people are hearing their work. in the same kind of generative

Tina: way. Yeah, I'll jump in for, for me, just two, two main things. One is how to push back against and understand the rhetoric, especially at my college.

Yulia: I just wanted to say like it's really great to hear that this knowledge that we're trying to like produce and distribute widely is useful and you know another way we are trying to share knowledge and kind of translate more specialized and academic knowledge into knowledge that can be absorbed and be useful to the movement is we're producing these kind of slide decks or zines for social media.

And it's people who didn't know that I'm affiliated with the Institute. And I just noticed that the conversation about Zionism and TERFism actually, I don't know, really advanced. And, you know, I think the way that the queer struggle really has absorbed and used the language and analysis of pinkwashing has been a result of tremendous work by scholars and organizers.

Lucia: Yeah, it feels like a, you know, one of the things we talked about, or we mentioned before, is just sort of like how quickly the co optation discourse machine works. And this is like, this is like really in a lot of ways, Accomplishing the work of like invigorating the way the vocabularies, we use the forms of analysis that we have, the tools at hand for naming reality.

And that is, so, I feel like that's just so important. And so I'm not surprised that you overheard people talking about talking, like using the terms of the podcast and, and finding it useful because I I know that's, I certainly, that's true for me. That's true for like my family who I keep passing the, the, the episodes onto the organizing crew at.

Emmaia: I'm reading two completely divergent sets of things, because I'm in the process of writing this book about the ADL's political history. And I, and because again, this sort of foundational question of race and how we talk about racism is at the heart of this. I've been reading Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma.

It's really telling, but the other thing that I'm reading and have been reading for absolutely ever is Isabella Hamad's novel, The Parisian, which is perhaps the most beautifully written novel I have ever read in my entire life. I highly recommend it if you want to read about Palestine in a historical, a historical way in relation to, I don't know, culture, global politics.

It's just gorgeous.

Yulia: I'm teaching a course that I call Palestinian Media Studies this quarter. You know, I, I'm a lecturer, so I get hired to teach things and I typically don't know what they're going to be until it's time to teach them. And this quarter I was hired to teach, and I quote, special topics in media studies.

And so I'm just so grateful that I get to teach that. And I get to talk about this work with my students. So that's, that's something that I'm really stoked about and then both me and Amaya are part of a work group of the Institute on the work of Fayez Sayed, who is a Palestinian philosopher, and I maybe think of him as historian but I'm not a philosopher so I, yeah, I don't know how to.

Emmaia: We'll send you the link. Great,

Tina: well we've got Tina. Okay, a friend of mine who teaches at Emory, whose sister in law teaches women gender studies at Duke, recommended this book to her, who recommended it to me. Her sister in law is Palestinian. Anyway, this is a novel that I just started by Susan Abulhawa.

And we're, we're studying Christian Zionism and the political implications. Anyway, all the connections. crazy stuff. So, and I'm also working on a, on a paper for a conference that's in a very short time. It's a panel on utopia. And so I'm, I do work in the last book of the Bible and I'm kind of a naysayer about that book, put it lightly.

So I'm, I'm talking about the utopia and the Christian Bible, the New Jerusalem and the exclusivity of it. And I'm going to have a section on, um, Francis Ford Coppola's new film, Megalopolis and the Utopia in that film, and I am watching, to decompress from all of that, the new rom com, Nobody Wants This is the name of it.

It's a Jewish rabbi with a shiksa. Anyway, Kristen Bell is in it. It's, it's one of the better rom coms, actually. I recommend it for fun. So, Lucia, you're next.

reading list, which we already mentioned here, but we'll link in the show notes that there are direct hyperlinks to this sort of trove of resources, some of which were familiar to me and others, others that, that were not that just kind of continuing to educate myself and kind of build up my own, my own knowledges around Palestinian resistance.

as a longstanding, longstanding tradition in which these contemporary uprisings are rooted. So that's been a really, that's been a really grounding and also upsetting, but also activating kind of, kind of practice to spend some time every weekend going, going through the next thing down on the list.

Tina: All

Lucia: right.

Our audio engineer is Aaliyah Harris. Our intro music is by Lance Eric Haugen, performed by Lance Eric Haugen with Aviva and the Flying Penguins. Our outro music is by the band Akraisis. Max Bowen raps guitar. and Mark McKee, Beats and Trumpet. And the song is called Unnervous from their album Children Singing in Hell, available on Bandcamp.

com. Thank you so much for listening.

Was it in Tahiti, that I saw, Was it in Tahiti, that I saw? This is for my friends who are punished far too harshly.