Join us for a conversation with Louis Fishman and Rashid Khalidi about Fishman’s recent publication, Jews and Palestinians in the late Ottoman Era 1908-1914, Claiming the Homeland, published by Edinburgh University Press (2019).

Uncovering a history buried by different nationalist narratives (Jewish, Israeli, Arab and Palestinian) this book looks at how the late Ottoman era set the stage for the on-going Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It presents an innovative analysis of the struggle in its first years, when Palestine was still an integral part of the Ottoman Empire. And it argues that in the late Ottoman era, Jews and Palestinians were already locked in conflict: the new freedoms introduced by the Young Turk Constitutional Revolution exacerbated divisions (rather than serving as a unifying factor). Offering an integrative approach, it considers both communities, together and separately, in order to provide a more sophisticated narrative of how the conflict unfolded in its first years.

Louis Fishman is an associate professor at Brooklyn College, City University of New York

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University

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Join us for a conversation with Bashir Bashir, Gil Anidjar, Leila Farsakh and Sherene Seiklay about The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond (Columbia University Press, 2020). Nadia Abu El-Haj will moderate the conversation.

Nineteenth-century Europe turned the political status of its Jewish communities into the “Jewish Question,” as both Christianity and rising forms of nationalism viewed Jews as the ultimate other. With the onset of Zionism, this “question” migrated to Palestine and intensified under British colonial rule and in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Zionism’s attempt to solve the “Jewish Question” created what came to be known as the “Arab Question,” which concerned the presence and rights of the Arab population in Palestine. For the most part, however, Jewish settlers denied or dismissed the question they created, to the detriment of both Arabs and Jews in Palestine and elsewhere.

Edited by Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh, this book brings together leading scholars to consider how these two questions are entangled historically and in the present day. Contributors include Gil Anidjar, Brian Klug, Amal Ghazal, Ella Shohat, Hakem Al-Rustom, Hillel Cohen, Yuval Evri, Derek Penslar, Jacqueline Rose, Moshe Behar, Maram Masarwi, and the editors, Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh.

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Bashir Bashir is associate professor in the Department of Sociology, Political Science, and Communication at the Open University of Israel and a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.

Gil Anidjar is Professor in the Departments of Religion and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS).

Leila Farsakh is associate professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Nadia Abu El-Haj is the Ann Olin Whitney Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia.

Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.