“Celebrating Amy Kaplan’s Our American Israel"

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This roundtable celebrates the upcoming Harvard University Press paperback publication of Amy Kaplan’s groundbreaking book Our American Israel. Published in 2018 just before her death in 2020, the book received an outpouring of reviews from strikingly different quarters, including Foreign Affairs, The Spectator, The Nation, the Electronic Intifada, and The Jewish Journal. Inspired by the urgency of her book then and now, this roundtable aspires to the broad cultural range of Kaplan’s work that Ta-Nehisi Coates calls Kaplan’s cultural lexicon – her insights into cultural expressions, cultural alchemy, and cultural perceptions across geographies and historical periods. One of Kaplan’s signature insights, that “cultural perceptions, to be sure, do not dictate policies,” resonates particularly strongly today, marking the shifting ground that makes the 2025 Our American Israel differently resonant and even more deeply “timely” (The Spectator) than it was in 2018.

Our American Israel unpacks the history and assumptions still fueling controversies over Israel today, tracking those assumptions across an interdisciplinary range that includes journalism, medial, literature, film, and popular culture and that always digs deeper, in its analysis, than the rapid-fire “pro” and “con” position-taking dominating our debates. Using the keywords listed below, each Roundtable participant will open up critical themes related to the questions Kaplan addresses in Our American Israel (paperback release date March 11, 2025), looking again at Kaplan’s questions about the unique nature of the American/Israeli alliance, about how Americans view Israel in relation to themselves, and about how ideas about Israel shape and define versions of American exceptionalism. In the wake of the recent war in Gaza, American reactions to that war, and the sitting President’s provocation that the U.S. will “own” Gaza and turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” Kaplan’s thoughtful book promises to open up the questions we need to be asking now; after short five-minute statements from the participants we will open up to what we hope will be a lively conversation with the audience.

Our aim is to produce a dialogue with the same power that Amy Kaplan courted in her cultural artifacts, objects of analysis which she says, “are effective precisely because they are capacious, inviting different meanings from diverse perspectives while effectively ruling out others.”

Anna Brickhouse: “Domesticity”
Mark Firmani: “Homeland Security”
Susan Gillman: "Culture"
Alex Lubin: “Exceptionalism"
Rafael Walker: “Masculinity and Empire"
Doug Rossinow: “Fragility”

Carla Kaplan: Moderator

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Carla Kaplan, Northeastern University

Panelists

• Anna Brickhouse, University of Virginia

• Mark Firmani, Amherst College

• Susan Gillman, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz

• Alex Lubin, Pennsylvania State University

• Rafael Walker, Baruch College, City University of New Y

• Douglas Rossinow, Metro State University

Biographical Information

Participant biographies:

Anna Brickhouse: Anna Brickhouse teaches English and American Studies at the University of Virginia. Her books have addressed empire across a range of periods: Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Cambridge 2004) received Honorable Mention for the ASA’s Lora Romero First Book Prize. Her second book, The Unsettlement of America (Oxford 2014) explored the early Americas and received Honorable Mention for the ASA’s John Hope Franklin Publication Prize. Her most recent book, Earthquake and the Invention of America: The Making of Elsewhere Catastrophe, was published by Oxford in 2024. She is currently co-editing with Susan Gillman The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and Empire.
Contact: acb2hf@virginia.edu


Mark Firmani:
Mark Firmani is an assistant professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. He received his JD from Yale Law School and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania’s department of English. He is currently working on two book projects. The first traces how contemporary Iraqi fiction—written in Arabic and published in English translation—critiques how the United States used international law to license the 2003 invasion and occupation. The second project explores how the figure of the monster and representations of monstrosity animate laws in the United States, surfacing in judicial opinions, legislative debates, statutes, regulations, and more. His writing has appeared in the Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature, Middle Eastern Literatures, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Contact: mfirmani@amherst.edu.

Susan Gillman: Susan Gillman is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of three University of Chicago Press books, Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America (1989), Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (2003), and American Mediterraneans: A Study in Geography, History, and Race (2022). She has worked collaboratively on several essay collections, devoted to nineteenth-century hemispheric studies, most recently with co-editor Anna Brickhouse on the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to American Literature and Empire, 2025). Contact: sgillman@ucsc.edu.

Carla Kaplan (moderator): Carla Kaplan, Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Northeastern University, has published 7 books, including Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, and Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, both New York Times Notable Books. Her biography of legendary anti-fascist muckraker Jessica Mitford, Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford, is forthcoming from HarperCollins in 2025. Kaplan chairs the Signs editorial board, founded Northeastern’s Humanities Center, has held fellowships from the NEH “Public Scholars,” the Guggenheim Foundation, Cullman Center, DuBois Institute, Schomburg Center, New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, and elsewhere, is on the board of Biographers International and is an elected Fellow of the Society of American Historians. Contact: C.Kaplan@Northeastern.edu.

Alex Lubin: Alex Lubin is Professor of African American Studies and History at Penn State University. He is the president-elect of the American Studies Association. His research and teaching explore transnational and diasporic Black cultural production across the Atlantic, North Africa, and the Middle East. His most recent books are the co-edited novel, Duse Mohamed Ali’s Ere Roosevelt Came: A Novel of the Global 1930s, and Never-Ending War on Terror. Lubin is currently writing a book titled, “Third World Ensemble: African Americans in Cairo Between the Suez and Six-Day Wars” which will be published by University of California Press.
Contact: alubin@psu.edu


Douglas C. Rossinow:
Doug Rossinow is professor in the Department of Ethnic, Gender, Historical, and Philosophical Studies at Metro State University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He earned his PhD in history at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of: The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (1998); Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America (2007); and The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s (2015). Among his recent publications are the essay “The Israel Question after Trump—and Before,” in a special issue on “Trump and the ‘Jewish Question’” in Studies in American Jewish Literature in 2020, and the essay “The Antisemitism Question and the Politics of Israel in Cold War America,” in the 2023 volume Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Politics of Definition, edited by David Feldman and Marc Volovici, in the Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism series. He is currently writing Promised Land: The Worlds of American Zionism, 1942-2025, which will be published by Oxford University Press, he hopes in 2026. Contact: doug.rossinow@metrostate.edu.


Rafael Walker:
Rafael Walker is assistant professor of English at Baruch College. He specializes in American and African American literature, theory of the novel, and gender and sexuality studies. Walker’s book, Realism after the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel, is due out with University of Chicago Press this fall. He is working on another book, “Biraciality in American Literature and Culture.” His essays have appeared or will soon in several journals, including ELH, J19, Twentieth-Century Literature, Studies in the Novel, and MELUS. He is the editor of two critical editions—The Awakening and Selected Stories (Warbler Classics) and Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing (Broadview Press). He writes often about issues in higher education, mostly for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Contact: rafael.walker@baruch.cuny.edu.