Temple University Beasley School of Law and IDEAL (Institutional Diversity, Equity, Advocacy and Leadership) present a Community Conversation: Talking (and Listening) About Israel and Palestine

Thursday, March 21, 2024
4:00 PM – 5:30 PM
Temple Law School, Klein Hall – K1D

Event Description

This Community Conversation features Sa’ed Atshan (Swarthmore College) and Arie Dubnov (George Washington University), two scholars whose perspectives on the crisis in Israel and Palestine are informed by both their academic work and their personal vantage points. The conversation will be an opportunity to learn about the conflict itself as well as how to navigate this and similar conversations with respect and empathy. Lila Corwin Berman, Murray Friedman Professor of American Jewish History and Director of Temple’s Feinstein Center for American Jewish History, will moderate.

Registration

Speakers

Dr. Arie Dubnov

Max Tiktin Chair of Israel Studies, George Washington University

Arie M. Dubnov is the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies. Trained in Israel and the U.S., he is a historian of twentieth century Jewish and Israeli history, with emphasis on the history of political thought, the study of nationalism, decolonization and partition politics, and with a subsidiary interest in the history of Israeli popular culture. Prior to his arrival at GW, Dubnov taught at Stanford University and the University of Haifa. He was a G.L. Mosse Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a participant in the National History Center’s International Decolonization Seminar, and recipient of the Dorset Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and was a Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford. 

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His publications include the intellectual biography Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (2012), and two edited volumes, Zionism – A View from the Outside (2010 [in Hebrew]), seeking to put Zionist history in a larger comparative trajectory, and Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-century Territorial Separatism (2019, co-edited with Laura Robson), tracing the genealogy of the idea of partition in the British interwar Imperial context and reconstructing the cross-border links connecting partition plans in Ireland, Palestine/Israel and India/Pakistan. Additionally, he has published numerous articles in leading journals in the field, including Nations & Nationalism, Modern Intellectual History, The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Rethinking History, Jewish Social Studies, The Journal of Israeli History and more.

Dr. Sa'ed Atshan

Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Anthropology, Swarthmore College

Dr. Sa’ed Atshan is Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Swarthmore College. He has previously served as an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emory University, as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Senior Research Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies. He earned a PhD in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies and MA in Social Anthropology from Harvard University, an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School, and BA from Swarthmore College. 

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Atshan is the author of Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2020), coauthor (with Katharina Galor) of The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (Duke University Press, 2020), and coeditor (with Galor) of Reel Gender: Palestinian and Israeli Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2022). 

Moderator

Dr. Lila Berman

Murray Friedman Professor of American Jewish History , Temple University

Lila Corwin Berman is Professor of History at Temple University, where she holds the Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History and directs the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History. She received her B.A. from Amherst College and her Ph.D. from Yale. Berman is author of The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion Dollar Institution (Princeton, 2020), as well as Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit (Chicago, 2015) and Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (California, 2009). Her articles have appeared in several scholarly journals, and she has also written guest columns for the Washington Post, the Forward, and the Jewish Week. She serves as the chair of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society.