Anti-Zionist Pedagogies and Coalition Building across the Interdisciplines

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

Calls to make Ethnic Studies “safe spaces” for Jews is rarely (if ever) about the safety of Jewish students, but rather, a tool of "imperial securitization" of American classrooms and colleges campuses, including the disciplining of liberatory, anti-colonial methods and pedagogies. With ever-growing reliance to use Jewish Studies-related curriculum to de-platform Ethnic Studies and criminalize student activism for Palestine nationwide, it is tantamount that scholars working within Jewish Studies work to actively disrupt and refuse the ways their field is weaponized to deplatform Ethnic Studies. This roundtable reflect an on-going process of building anti-Zionist pedagogy from inside Jewish Studies, including critical methodologies, theories, and other tools for refusing Zionist repression of Ethnic Studies at the primary, secondary, and post-secondary level.

Maxwell Greenberg and Jessie Stoolman will offer resources for Ethnic Studies educators who experience inter-intra-University harassment on the basis of claims that Jewish students are “unsafe”; their comments will foreground the finding from their research on the foundational antagonistic relationship between Jewish Studies and anti-colonial interdisciplines. Alice Mishkin’s research looks at the relationships between antisemitism and Islamophobia, and the tensions that arise when addressing both within leftist movement. In this skills sharing session, Mishkin will propose tools for identifying and responding to antisemitism without giving ammunition to those who weaponize antisemitism. Building on Mishkin’s comments, Barry Trachtenberg will provide participants with some of the critical skills to navigate and respond to allegations of antisemitism that are strategically used to suppress research, teaching, and advocacy that is critical of Zionism and in support of Palestinian human rights in academic spaces. Through historical and rhetorical analyses and practical strategies, participants will gain tools for distinguishing between legitimate concerns about antisemitism and politically motivated attempts to suppress academic discourse and ways to respond to these attacks. Finally, Julia Wedgle will consider the importance of and offer strategies and materials for the decentering of Ashkenazi Judaism in the introductory Jewish studies classroom, and other related introductory courses, in order to help draw attention to the often overlooked diversity and range of Jewish diasporic cultures, histories, and traditions. Christine Hong, will serve as a discussant and though-partner, as we explore the specific stakes Jewish Studies scholars have in the fight against Zionist repression, and possible avenues for meaningful solidarities across the interdisciplines.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Panelists

• Maxwell Greenberg, Goucher College

• Jessie Stoolman

• Alice Mishkin, University of Michigan

• Barry Trachtenberg, Wake Forest University

• Julia M. Wedgle, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

Comment

• Christine Hong, University of California Santa Cruz

Biographical Information

Maxwell Greenberg is an Assistant Professor of American and Judaic Studies at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. Greenberg writes and teaches about the production of race, religion, and place in the US, with special interests in Western settler colonialisms, social movements, and public memory. He is the author of several scholarly articles and book chapters about Jewish history and memory in the American West and is currently working on several public-facing writing projects, including a co-authored article about the history of Jewish Studies in US Academia, and its foundational and oppositional relationship to Ethnic Studies.

Christine Hong is Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) and Literature at UC Santa Cruz where she organized alongside students for ethnic studies and served as the founding chair of CRES. She directs the Center for Racial Justice at UC Santa Cruz, serves on the board of directors of the Korea Policy Institute, an independent research and educational institute, and is part of the leadership core of the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council. She also is a member of the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and the organizing collective for the UC People’s Tribunal for Palestine. In greater Santa Cruz, she serves on the board of Santa Cruz Black and organizes with Pajaro Valley for Ethnic Studies and Justice. Her book, A Violent Peace: Race, Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific, was published by Stanford University Press in 2020. Along with Deann Borshay Liem, she co-directed the Legacies of the Korean War oral history project.

Alice Mishkin is a doctoral student at the University of Michigan. She will receive her PhD in American Culture, with a specialization in Arab and Muslim American Studies and a certificate in Judaic Studies. She also holds an MSW and a certificate in Jewish Communal Leadership from the University of Michigan. Alice’s dissertation, entitled A Very Narrow Bridge: American Jews and the Palestine Solidarity Movement, addresses the complexity of Jewish American positionality within liberal, progressive, and leftist social movements for Israel/Palestine through a rich and comprehensive ethnography of IfNotNow, an American Jewish organization founded in 2014.

Jessie Stoolman (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at UCLA in the Department of Anthropology. Her project focuses on how the Moroccan archival landscape shapes collective memory of Black-Jewish history. She has published academic and non-academic writing in international journals, including Hespéris-Tamuda and Asymptote. She aspires to join the publishing world to encourage accessibility in academic writing.

Barry Trachtenberg serves on the Academic Advisory Board of Jewish Voice for Peace and of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. He is a historian of modern European and American Jewry, and the author of three books, The Holocaust and the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye (Rutgers, 2022); The United States and the Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance (Bloomsbury, 2018); and The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917 (Syracuse University Press, 2008).

Julia Mason Wedgle (she/her) is a PhD student in Religious Studies, with a concentration in Religion in the Americas, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her work centers on activism as lived religion, Jewish leftism in the United States, Jewish labor activism, contemporary Jewish anti-Zionism, and Yiddishism. She holds a Master of Theological Studies, with a concentration in Religion, Ethics, and Politics from Harvard Divinity School and a BA in Peace and Justice Studies and Community Health from Tufts University.