A Conversation with Omer Bartov, Marianne Hirsch and Rashid Khalidi, moderated by Sonali Thakkar.

Please join the Cultural Memory Seminar and the Center for Palestine Studies for a discussion of the uses and abuses of memory in the aftermath of October 7, 2023. Attendees are asked to read four short articles by the speakers in advance of the event.

This program is co-presented by the Cultural Memory University Seminar and the Center for Palestine Studies.

Advanced registration is required.
Attendees are asked to read three short articles by the speakers in advance of the event.

SPEAKERS
Omer Bartov is Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. He has written extensively on war crimes and genocide. Recent publications include Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), winner of the National Jewish Book Award; Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022), and Genocide, the Holocaust, and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis (2023). He is currently writing a book tentatively titled “The Broken Promise: A Personal Political History of Israel and Palestine.” 

Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor Emerita in English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender at Columbia, and co-director of the University Seminar on Cultural Memory. She writes about the transmission of memories of violent histories across generations, a process she has termed “postmemory.” Her recent books include School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference (2020), co-authored with Leo Spitzer, and the co-edited volume Women Mobilizing Memory (2019). She is working on a book about reparative memory.

Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies Emeritus at Columbia University. He has taught at the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, and the University of Chicago, was co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies and served as President of the Middle East Studies Association. He is the author of eight books, most recently The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler- Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017. 

MODERATOR
Sonali Thakkar is Associate Professor of English at NYU. She is the author of The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought (Stanford 2023).

READINGS
Omer Bartov. “As a Former IDF Soldier and Historian of Genocide, I Was Deeply Disturbed by My Recent Visit to Israel.” The Guardian, 13 August 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov.

Marianne Hirsch. “Rethinking Holocaust Memory after October 7.” Public Books, 15 July 2024. https://www.publicbooks.org/rethinking-holocaust-memory-after-october-7/.

Rashid Khalidi. “‘A New Abyss’: Gaza and the Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.” The Guardian, 11 April 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/11/a-new-abyss-gaza-and-the-hundred-years-war-on-palestine.

Naomi Klein. “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war.”  The Guardian, 5 October 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/oct/05/israel-gaza-october-7-memorials. 

Join the Middle East Institute and the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University and the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University for an online conversation examining the social and spatial impacts of the regional war in Palestine and Lebanon.

The panelists, Lara Deeb, Elias Muhanna, and Ali H. Musleh will examine how the current violence intensifies the existing challenges that communities were already facing, as a result of past wars, conflict and systemic corruption. They will focus particularly on how communities and neighborhoods, across religious, ethnic, gender and class lines, are affected by the escalation of violence and displacement. What is the role of diasporic and global networks in advocating and supporting local communities? What role does the academy have in responding to the effects of violence in these impacted societies?

SPEAKERS
Lara Deeb is Laura Vausbinder Hockett Endowed Chair, and Professor of Anthropology and MENA Studies at Scripps College in the Claremont Consortium. Her most recent book, Love Across Difference: Mixed Marriage in Lebanon was just published by Stanford University Press. In addition to numerous articles and chapters, Deeb is also the author of An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘i Lebanon (Princeton University Press, 2006), co-author of Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’ite South Beirut (Princeton University Press, 2013), co-author of Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2015), and co-editor of the volume Practicing Sectarianism Archival and Ethnographic Interventions on Lebanon (Stanford University Press, 2023).

Elias Muhanna is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and History at Brown University, and director of the Center for Middle East Studies. He is a scholar of classical Arabic literature and Islamic history, and his essays and criticism appear regularly in the mainstream press. He has written for The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The New York Times, The Nation, and other periodicals.

Ali H. Musleh is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University, where he is working on his manuscript To What Abyss Does This Robot Take the Earth? which explores the automation of settler colonial warfare. His forthcoming piece, “The Question of Genocide,” will be published in Social Text in December 2024.  

MODERATOR
Kathryn S. Poots is a sociologist based at Columbia's Middle East Institute and Center for the Study of Muslim Societies. Her publications include the monograph: Religion and Nation: Iranian Local and Transnational Networks in Britain (Berghahn Publishers, Oxford and New York, 2005) and the edited volumes: Gender, Governance and Islam (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest: The Arab Spring and Beyond (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and Ethnographies of Islam: Ritual Performances and Everyday Practices (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

What does Gaza teach us about the relationship between media and the politics of annihilation?

The convergence of technologies of mass destruction, the camera, and 21st century communications infrastructure has turned Gaza into a place exclusively accessible through live-streamed images of destruction and atrocity so profound that many human rights organizations regard them as evidence of a genocide. In result, global witnesses have been cognitively, affectively and somatically brought into processual proximity to the realities of war — including possible war crimes and crimes against humanity — in unprecedented ways.

Jonathan Beller and Ali Musleh discuss the consequences of this emergent media ecology, how it shapes our everyday encounter with war, and the ethical and political implications of inhabiting a world fractured and fractalized by the question of genocide.

This event is organized by the Center for Palestine Studies and co-sponsored by The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.

Please note: Advanced registration is required for all attendees, including CU/BC ID holders.

SPEAKERS
Jonathan Beller is Professor of Humanities and Media Studies and co-founder of the Graduate
Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. Beller is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of English, Film, and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Ali Musleh is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow at the Columbia University Center for Palestine Studies.

VENUE
Second Floor Common Room,
SOF/Heyman Center for the Humanities

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