The university’s Center for the Study of Muslim & Arab Worlds, with the California Faculty Association’s Palestine, Arab, and Muslim Caucus, will present a panel discussion on how antisemitism has been used as a tactic to suppress criticism of the Israeli government’s policies in Palestinian territories, which has hindered constructive dialogue and understanding of the hardships Palestinians endure.

“On Weaponizing Anti-Semitism” will take place at 2 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 21, on Zoom, and will include a question-and-answer session; register for the event online.

Event organizers say the instrumentalization of the antisemitism discourse “not only suppresses progressive opposition within and outside of Israel but also impedes garnering sympathy for Palestinian suffering, especially among nation-states historically aligned with Israel, such as the United States.”

Panelists are:

  • Judith Butler, Distinguished Professor of comparative literature, UC Berkeley. Butler is also the former Maxine Elliot Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the UC Berkeley. They are author of several books, including “Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging” (with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in 2008), “Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?” (2009), “Is Critique Secular?” (co-written with Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, and Saba Mahmood, 2009), “Sois Mon Corps; (2011), co-authored with Catherine Malabou, “Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism” (2012), “Dispossession: The Performative in the Political” (co-authored with Athena Athanasiou 2013), and “Senses of the Subject and Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly” (2015), among others. Their books have been translated into more than 27 languages.
  • Keith Feldman, associate professor of ethnic studies, UC Berkeley. His first book, “A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America” (Minnesota, 2015), explores the changeful complexity of race in its historical particularity, its representational density, and its transnational circulation. It asks, how have Israel and Palestine impacted U.S. racial and imperial formations, how have shifting conceptions of race in the U.S. shaped symbolic and material relationships to Israel and Palestine, and how have different cultural forms been used to surface knowledge in the process? “A Shadow over Palestine” received the 2017 Best Book in Humanities and Cultural Studies (Literary Studies) from the Association for Asian American Studies, and was a finalist for the American Studies Association’s 2016 Lora Romero First Book Publication prize. With Abigail De Kosnik, he has co-edited a collection of essays, “#identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation” (Michigan, 2019).
  •  Ahlam Muhtaseb, professor of media studies, CSUSB. She is the recipient of the 2020 CSUSB Outstanding Scholarship, Research and Creative Activities Award and was one of the 2019-20 Outstanding Research and Creative Activity Faculty Mentor Awardees. She has an M.A. in Journalism and a Ph.D. in digital communication from the University of Memphis, Tennessee. Her research interests include digital communication, digital resistance & decolonization, social justice and diasporic communities. Her research has appeared in national and international publications, such as the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication and Arab Studies Quarterly, and has been presented at national and international conferences. Her documentary, "1948: Creation & Catastrophe," was screened at over 20 film festivals and at universities and community organizations throughout the world. The film, co-produced and co-directed with Andy Trimlett, focuses on the year 1948 and its catastrophic consequences for the Palestinian nation, which originated from her field work in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. She won the 2019 Rebuilding Alliance “Story Teller” Award. The film also won the Jerusalem International Film Festival’s 2019 Special Jury Award in the Feature Documentary category. She is working currently on a study of Palestinian digital resistance and decolonizing digital spaces. In addition, she was co-producer and lead researcher on the recently released documentary, “36 Seconds: Portrait of a Hate Crime," about three young Muslims murdered in Chapel Hill in 2015.

The panel will be moderated by Sang Hea Kil, professor of justice studies at San José State. She is a scholar-activist who looks at whiteness and the news media, and is the winner of the 2021 Outstanding Academic Title: Media and Communication, Choice (the publishing unit of the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association) for “Covering the Border War: How the News Media Creates Crime, Race, Nation, and the USA-Mexico Divide” (2019).

Event flyer, Nov. 21.