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The CMES Director's Series presents
Sa'ed Atshan
Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies, Swarthmore College; Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology & Visiting Scholar in Middle Eastern Studies, Univ of California, Berkeley (2020-21), and,
Katharina Galor
Hirschfeld Visiting Assistant Professor at the Program in Judaic Studies, Brown University
Register: https://bit.ly/2HEAjVa
Berlin is home to Europe’s largest Palestinian diaspora community and one of the world’s largest Israeli diaspora communities. Germany’s guilt about the Nazi Holocaust has led to a public disavowal of anti-Semitism and strong support for the Israeli state. Meanwhile, Palestinians in Berlin report experiencing increasing levels of racism and Islamophobia. In The Moral Triangle (Duke Univ Press, 2020) Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Israelis, Palestinians, and Germans in Berlin to explore these asymmetric relationships in the context of official German policies, public discourse, and the private sphere. They show how these relationships stem from narratives surrounding moral responsibility, the Holocaust, the Israel/Palestine conflict, and Germany’s recent welcoming of Middle Eastern refugees. They also point to spaces for activism and solidarity among Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians in Berlin that can help foster restorative justice and account for multiple forms of trauma. Highlighting their interlocutors’ experiences, memories, and hopes, Atshan and Galor demonstrate the myriad ways in which migration, trauma, and contemporary state politics are inextricably linked.
Sa’ed Atshan (PhD Harvard University) is Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College, where he is also Coordinator of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program. He previously served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. As an anthropologist and peace and conflict studies scholar, Atshan's research is focused on a) contemporary Palestinian society and politics, b) global LGBTQ social movements, and c) Quaker Studies and Christian minorities in the Middle East. His forthcoming book, Paradoxes of Humanitarianism: The Social Life of Aid in the Palestinian Territories , is under contract with Stanford University Press in their Anthropology of Policy Series. In it, Atshan examines the politics of international aid provision in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He has also published Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2020). Dr. Atshan is on sabbatical for the 2020-2021 academic year at the University of California, Berkeley as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Visiting Scholar in Middle Eastern Studies.
Katharina Galor is the Hirschfeld Visiting Assistant Professor at the Program in Judaic Studies at Brown University. After her licence (1988), maîtrise (1989) and diplôme d’études approfondi (1991) from the University of Aix-Marseille in France, she received her Ph.D. at Brown University (1996) and completed her post-doctoral studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1997). Galor has taught Syro-Palestinian archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (The Rothberg School for Overseas Students), at the École biblique et archéologique française in Jerusalem and at Tufts University in the US. She has excavated at a number of sites in Italy (Vigna Barberini in Rome), France (Old Jewish quarter of Cavaillon and the Byzantine church at Roquevert) and Israel (Jerusalem, Sepphoris, Qumran, Ein Gedi, Ramat Hanadiv, Tiberias and Apollonia-Arsuf).
This event is open to the public, but registration is required for this Zoom webinar.
Contact: Liz Flanagan