Shelley Frydman
Following the ICSZ student works-in-progress conference in August 2024, presenters were invited to write further reflections on their research. ICSZ is thrilled to present this series on emerging research.
In her widely read piece, “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” bell hooks describes a gathering where a group of primarily Black women discussed whether Black male leaders should be subjected to feminist critiques. hooks recounts her response to the complaint that their meeting was “all talk,” countering that Black women do not have the opportunities to theorize enough. hooks insisted “that we need new theories that can move us towards revolutionary struggle rooted in an attempt to understand both the nature of our contemporary predicament and the means by which we might collectively engage in resistance struggle.”
While the struggle for Palestinian liberation is simultaneously distinct and deeply tied to the systems oppressing Black people in the United States, scholars studying Zionism are intimately experienced with estrangement from theorizing and reflection. On the one hand, liberal institutions, many of which have embraced Zionism, systematically silence those thinking critically about Zionism. Indeed, countless faculty have been ousted for speaking publicly for Palestinian liberation. There is a particular dread of the already awful job market for those of us who study Palestine and Zionism. I personally have been kindly cautioned by faculty deeply invested in my academic future that studying and publishing on Zionism may expose me to both limitations in the academic job market and personal attacks. On the other hand, the urgency of the genocide in Gaza also estranges us from theorizing, leaving my colleagues and I wondering if there is any real-world value to working on our research on Palestine or Zionism in our comfortable offices in South Bend, Indiana.
The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism’s Mini-Student Conference pushed against these obstacles to theorizing. The conference brought together a community of undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and practitioners to think critically about Zionism, how the study of Zionism fits into academia, and how our work within the academy can manifest in liberatory praxis. Students shared research on how Zionism should be understood as indoctrination – and what this means for how to engage with Jewish Zionists – how Zionism targets Black Christian Churches, and the critical process of building an anti-Zionist curriculum as an organizing tool. The Zoom chat exploded as a student shared his deep theorizing on civility politics and the encampment at his school, with students and faculty alike reminiscing on both the promise and the oppression of the encampments of the so-called student intifada of Spring 2024.
The research that I presented at ICSZ’s Student Mini-Conference was born in the wake of October 7. During a semester overloaded with extra coursework, I stared in dread at Instagram posts announcing the rising death tolls. While grief and activism depleted my energy, it also felt impossible to spend the time I did spend on academic work thinking about anything other than Zionism and the underlying history and systems that have enabled the current genocide. Based on a assignment from a class on intersectionality, I began to interrogate how we can think about the (in)compatibility of Zionism and critical intersectionality. Using the Women’s March as an entry point, these questions also prompted a broader question: what does it even mean for movements to be intersectional?
I have continued to grapple with these questions for almost the entire duration of the genocide. Even while my research focus on the Women’s March, current resistance within the United States provides a furtile context for further exploration. Indeed, the current movement for Palestinian liberation provides a fruitful context to continue to explore this question. While I impulsively feel that this movement is “more intersectional” than the Women’s March, this time has enabled me to continue to explore what this even means. This theoretical work, combined with the activism I have engaged with both locally and nationally, is simultaneously an immense privilege and an isolating experience, as I have distanced myself from friends and colleagues who are not deeply impacted by the genocidal violence in Gaza.
Even as a student at a relatively supportive institute with a faculty that includes leading anti-Zionism scholars and practitioners, this conference provided both a critical space for reflection and an expanded community of scholars critically examining the complexity of Zionism as a “political, ideological, racial, and gendered knowledge project.” The conference both provided me with fruitful grounds to continue to develop my paper into an article, while also posing broader questions for further exploration. In particular, I am eager to continue to think with the ICSZ community about if and how individual-level interventions can impact systems, the potential for anti-imperialism within feminist movements, and the ever-important question of how our academic work can contribute to dismantling imperial regimes. Answering hooks’s call for further collective theorizing, the ICSZ Student-Mini Conference provided a critical space for engaging in the critical study of Zionism.
References
bell hooks, “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 4, no. 1 (1992 1991), 6.
“Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism,” https://criticalzionismstudies.org.