The Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations in the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto invites applications for a full-time tenure stream position in Palestinian Literature and Culture. The appointment will be at the rank of Associate Professor or Professor, with an anticipated start date of July 1, 2026.
Applications are due by 10/06/2025, 11:59PM ET.
Learn more here.
READ | 'I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump' by Rashid Khalidi
I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump.
The university’s draconian policies and new definition of antisemitism make much teaching impossible.
By Rashid Khalidi
Published in The Guardian on August 1, 2025
Read this op-ed on The Guardian’s website here.
Dear Acting President Shipman,
I am writing you an open letter since you have seen fit to communicate the recent decisions of the board of trustees and the administration in a similar fashion.
These decisions, taken in close collaboration with the Trump administration, have made it impossible for me to teach modern Middle East history, the field of my scholarship and teaching for more than 50 years, 23 of them at Columbia. Although I have retired, I was scheduled to teach a large lecture course on this topic in the fall as a “special lecturer”, but I cannot do so under the conditions Columbia has accepted by capitulating to the Trump administration in June.
Specifically, it is impossible to teach this course (and much else) in light of Columbia’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition deliberately, mendaciously and disingenuously conflates Jewishness with Israel, so that any criticism of Israel, or indeed description of Israeli policies, becomes a criticism of Jews. Citing its potential chilling effect, a co-author of the IHRA definition, Professor Kenneth Stern, has repudiated its current uses. Yet Columbia has announced that it will serve as a guide in disciplinary proceedings.
Under this definition of antisemitism, which absurdly conflates criticism of a nation-state, Israel, and a political ideology, Zionism, with the ancient evil of Jew-hatred, it is impossible with any honesty to teach about topics such as the history of the creation of Israel, and the ongoing Palestinian Nakba, culminating in the genocide being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza with the connivance and support of the US and much of western Europe.
The Armenian genocide, the nature of the absolute monarchies and military dictatorships that blight most of the Arab world, the undemocratic theocracy in Iran, the incipient dictatorial regime in Türkiye, the fanaticism of Wahhabism: all of these are subject to detailed analysis in my course lectures and readings. However, a simple description of the discriminatory nature of Israel’s 2018 Nation State Law – which states that only the Jewish people have the right of self-determination in Israel, half of whose subjects are Palestinian – or of the apartheid nature of its control over millions of Palestinians who have been under military occupation for 58 years would be impossible in a Middle East history course under the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
It is not only faculty members’ academic freedom and freedom of speech that is infringed upon by Columbia’s capitulation to Trump’s diktat. Teaching assistants would be seriously constrained in leading discussion sections, as would students in their questions and discussions, by the constant fear that informers would snitch on them to the fearsome apparatus that Columbia has erected to punish speech critical of Israel, and to crack down on alleged discrimination – which at this moment in history almost invariably amounts simply to opposition to this genocide. Scores of students and many faculty members have been subjected to these kangaroo courts, students such as Mahmoud Khalil have been snatched from their university housing, and Columbia has now promised to render this repressive system even more draconian and opaque.
You have stated that no “red lines” have been crossed by these decisions. However, Columbia has appointed a vice-provost initially tasked with surveilling Middle Eastern studies, and it has ordained that faculty and staff must submit to “trainings” on antisemitism from the likes of the Anti-Defamation League, for whom virtually any critique of Zionism or Israel is antisemitic, and Project Shema, whose trainings link many anti-Zionist critiques to antisemitism. It has accepted an “independent” monitor of “compliance” of faculty and student behavior from a firm that in June 2025 hosted an event in honor of Israel. According to Columbia’s agreement with the Trump administration, this “Monitor will have timely access to interview all Agreement-related individuals, and visit all Agreement-related facilities, trainings, transcripts of Agreement-related meetings and disciplinary hearings, and reviews”. Classrooms are pointedly NOT excluded from possible visits from these external non academics.
The idea that the teaching, syllabuses and scholarship of some of the most prominent academics in their fields should be vetted by such a vice-provost, such “trainers” or an outside monitor from such a firm is abhorrent. It constitutes the antithesis of the academic freedom that you have disingenuously claimed will not be infringed by this shameful capitulation to the anti-intellectual forces animating the Trump administration.
I regret deeply that Columbia’s decisions have obliged me to deprive the nearly 300 students who have registered for this popular course – as many hundreds of others have done for more than two decades – of the chance to learn about the history of the modern Middle East this fall. Although I cannot do anything to compensate them fully for depriving them of the opportunity to take this course, I am planning to offer a public lecture series in New York focused on parts of this course that will be streamed and available for later viewing. Proceeds, if any, will go to Gaza’s universities, every one of which has been destroyed by Israel with US munitions, a war crime about which neither Columbia nor any other US university has seen fit to say a single word.
Columbia’s capitulation has turned a university that was once a site of free inquiry and learning into a shadow of its former self, an anti-university, a gated security zone with electronic entry controls, a place of fear and loathing, where faculty and students are told from on high what they can teach and say, under penalty of severe sanctions. Disgracefully, all of this is being done to cover up one of the greatest crimes of this century, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a crime in which Columbia’s leadership is now fully complicit.
– Rashid Khalidi
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University and author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine
Photograph: Danielle Amy
ATTEND | Engineering Destruction: Militarization and the War Economy Conference, 7/29-31
Join the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute for International Studies at Brizeit University for
Engineering Destruction: Militarization and the War Economy
July 29-31
In-person and Online
The "Engineering Destruction: Militarization and the War Economy" conference is held amidst a brutal war of extermination waged by the Zionist regime against the Palestinian people and those in solidarity with them. This moment lays bare, with unprecedented ferocity, the deep structures of militarization and machinery of death, revealing how massacres are managed as part of an interconnected economic and security system that regards human beings not as lives of value, but as testing grounds for instruments of violence and repression or as resources to be exploited. Within this violent context in Palestine and beyond, the conference seeks to critically examine the structural relationship between militarization and the war economy. It rejects the narratives of dominant states and actors, and instead re-centers dispossessed, oppressed, and resisting communities as essential to understanding our world today.
Wars are not accidental or exceptional events; they are instruments used to reshape political geographies, entrench economic domination, and expand surveillance and repression. From the occupation of land to the militarization of the skies, from precision killing technologies to policies of siege and isolation, the conference interrogates how societies are transformed into laboratories for the development of weapons and tools of control, particularly in the era of neoliberalism and the alliance between capital and security corporations.
The conference traces the silent spread of militarization into all aspects of life: in universities, on streets, through separation walls, and on the bodies of refugees and detainees. It also sheds light on the systematic repression targeting student movements and activists resisting authoritarian regimes, and those in solidarity with Palestine across the globe.
This conference, however, does not stop at diagnosing the engineering of destruction. It also listens to the voices of resistance: from the boycott of complicit corporations, to the building of transnational solidarity networks, to the reclamation of public spaces as sites of struggle. Militarization is not only confronted through arms, but through collective awareness, refusal, and the reconstruction of alternative and more just realities.
This conference constitutes a collective space for critical thought and political action, reinforcing our commitment to dismantling systems of oppression and confronting their material and symbolic structures in a historical moment that demands moral clarity and intellectual courage. Even within this militarized world, there have always been energies and tools striving to create a future grounded in justice and freedom.
READ | Two new articles by Nathaniel George, IAL 2020-21
CPS congratulates our former Ibrahim Abu-Lughod fellow, Nathaniel George, on the publications of two new articles. Nate is Lecturer in Politics of the Middle East, Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London.
“Survival in an Age of Revolution”: Charles Malik, Philo-Colonialism, and Global Counterrevolution
The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 2, June 2025, Pages 600–637, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaf007
ABSTRACT While great effort has been invested in analyzing the role of revolutionary intellectuals in history, much less attention has been paid to the counterrevolution and its guides. This is especially the case in the former colonial world in the era of decolonization, where anticolonial politics are often portrayed as having been the default position. Lebanese philosopher and statesman Charles Malik was a candid opponent of what he theorized as the “great Asian and African revolution” against imperial rule. Instead, he advocated consciously counterrevolutionary politics that sought to purify the corruptions of “collectivism, materialism, and secularism” brought forward by an age of anticolonial and socialist revolutions. Primarily known as a principal author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it was in the Lebanese arena that his global political commitments were most directly expressed. This included his decisive role in securing US military intervention during Lebanon’s 1958 civil war, and more fundamentally in his founding role in the Front for Freedom and Man in Lebanon (FFML), the counterrevolutionary, Christian-supremacist alliance in Lebanon’s international civil war (1975–90). Malik’s praxis highlights an overlooked philo-colonial trend in the era of decolonization: native advocates for continued imperial sovereignty over a dependent and rigidly stratified nation-state without equal citizenship. Malik’s ideological and material entanglements on multiple scales foreground the defining part of counterrevolutionary networks in shaping the global history of twentieth century and its inheritance.
‘The Lebanese Front of the War for Palestine,’ a short piece contextualizing Israel’s most recent war on Lebanon in a Cultural Anthropology Hot Spot (2025)
READ | Chronic Erasure: Eradicating Heritage in Gaza and Ayodhya, co-authored by Brian Boyd
Chronic Erasure: Eradicating Heritage in Gaza and Ayodhya
Co-Authors
Mazen Iwaisi, Jamal Barghouth, Ashish Avikunthak, Brian Boyd
https://anthrosource-onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/doi/10.1111/aman.28086
READ | Race and the Question of Palestine, Edited Volume by Lana Tatour and Ronit Lentin
This book develops from the position that the colonization of Palestine—like other imperial and settler colonial projects—cannot be understood outside the grammar of race. Race and the Question of Palestine explores how race operates as a technology of power and colonial rule, a political and economic structure, a set of legal and discursive practices, and a classificatory system.
Offering a wide-ranging set of essays by historians, legal scholars, political scientists, sociologists, literary scholars, and race critical theorists, this collection illuminates how race should be understood in terms of its political work, and not as an identity category interchangeable with ethnicity, culture, or nationalism. Essays build on a long-standing tradition of theorizing race in Palestine studies and speak to four interconnected themes—the politics of racialization and regimes of race, racism and antiracism, race and capital accumulation, and Black–Palestinian solidarity. These engagements challenge the exceptionalism of the Palestinian case, and stress the importance of locating Palestine within global histories and present politics of imperialism, settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy.
Contributors: Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Seraj Assi, Abigail B. Bakan, Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Yinon Cohen, Noura Erakat, Michael R. Fischbach, Neve Gordon, Alana Lentin, David Palumbo-Liu, John Reynolds, Kieron Turner
The book is available for pre-order here 20% off with Discount Code: QUESTION20
CONGRATS | Areej Sabbagh-Khoury Awarded SAGE Current Sociology Best Paper Prize
We are delighted to share that an article by former Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow (Fall 2015) Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, 'Settler Colonialism and the Archives of Apprehension' (2022), has been awarded the Annual SAGE Current Sociology Best Paper Prize. According to the prize committee, the award recognizes 'an outstanding paper from the year published in the journal, noted for its originality, innovation, significance, and influence in the field.'
Read more here.
ATTEND | "Our American Israel" Panel Discussion, 05/06/25
Tuesday, May 6
6-8PM | Prime Produce
424 West 54th Street
New York, NY 10019
"No other book goes so deeply into American culture and intellectual life to explain the bond between two countries” – Rashid Khalidi
An essential account of America's most controversial alliance, Our American Israel sheds light on how the "special relationship" between Israel and the US came to be and how that strong and divisive partnership plays out in our times.
Through an impeccably researched examination of popular narratives in American news media, fiction, and film, Amy Kaplan shows how cultural stories helped create a shared sense of identity between two nations that both had histories as settler societies.
Since its oringinal publication in 2018, the events of October 7, 2023 and the subsequent destruction of Gaza have made Kaplan’s insights more urgent than ever. It is therefore our honor to celebrate the release of Our American Israel in paperback, so that its imperative message can help to educate more people and may continue to inform the conversation about the U.S.’s deeply embedded relationship with Israel.
Books will be available for sale. If you wish to order the book from the publisher, you can save 20% before April 30th with the code OAI20.
AUTHOR
Amy Kaplan was Edward W. Kane Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of Our American Israel, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, and The Social Construction of American Realism, she was a past president of the American Studies Association and was awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Advanced Study before her untimely passing from brain cancer in 2020. For more information about the book and Kaplan's work, click here.
SPEAKERS
Simone Zimmerman is a Jewish American activist and co-founder of the IfNotNow Movement. Her story is featured in the film 2023 documentary Israelism.
Andrew Ross is a social activist, writer and Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. He is author of numerous books and articles, including Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality (with Julie Livingson) 2022, and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Newsweek, and Al Jazeera.
Moustafa Bayoumi is a writer, journalist, and professor of English at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and author of How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America, winner of American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award.
Shoshana Akua Brown is an organizer, popular educator and healer who offers trainings on such topics as Pedagogy of the Oppressed, restorative justice, and antiracism. Co-founder of the Black Jewish Liberation Collective and US Director of Pedagogy and Training for the Diaspora Alliance, Shoshana hosts the radio show Beyond The Pale on WBAI, with Rafael Shimunov.