Amplify knowledge about Zionism, anti-Zionism, Palestine, repression, resistance, and interrelated topics. Contact info@criticalzionismstudies.org to reach a speaker listed below.
Hil Aked, London, UK
EXPERTISE: Zionist movement; Zionist repression; lawfare; academic freedom; racism; lobbying; anti-BDS activism; free speech; state power.
DETAILS
Hil Aked (they/he) is a writer, investigative researcher and activist with a background in political sociology whose work has appeared in the Guardian, Independent, Sky News and Al Jazeera, as well as volumes from Pluto Press and Zed Books/Bloomsbury. Their first book Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity, published by Verso, was shortlisted for the Bread & Roses Award 2024.
AVAILABLE TO speak in person, speak online, speak at hybrid event, consult on these issues
Evelyn Alsultany, Los Angeles, CA
EXPERTISE: How the US media has demonized Palestinians; Why antisemitism and Islamophobia workshops on college campuses are inadequate DEI responses to October 7; Anti-Arab racism, anti-Muslim racism, anti-Palestinian racism – how they overlap and why we need to use “anti-Palestinian racism” in the context of Palestine.
DETAILS
Evelyn Alsultany is a leading expert on the history of representations of Arabs and Muslims in the US media. She is the author of Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion (NYU Press, 2022), which was listed as one of the 10 best scholarly books of 2022 by The Chronicle of Higher Education. She is also the author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 (NYU Press, 2012), which was listed as one of the 50 best Hollywood books of all time by the LA Times. She is the co-editor of Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging (Syracuse University Press, 2011), winner of the Arab American National Museum’s Evelyn Shakir Book Award, and Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora (University of Michigan Press, 2013). She is a professor in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California’s Dornsife College. Professor Alsultany’s expertise encompasses how the US media demonizes Palestinians; the overlaps and distinctions between anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian racism; and how diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives on college campuses tend to fail when it comes to Palestine rights activism.
AVAILABLE TO speak online
Heather Ferguson, Claremont McKenna College/Southern California
EXPERTISE: Racialization of religion as an early modern phenomenon; Empires and Nation-States: Evolving Landscapes of Exclusion; Historical Landscapes of Palestine: Ottoman Imperial, Colonial, Settler Colonial; The Palestine Exception: Epistemic Ruptures and Academic Freedom.
DETAILS
Racialization of religion as an early modern phenomenon; Empires and Nation-States: Evolving Landscapes of Exclusion; Historical Landscapes of Palestine: Ottoman Imperial, Colonial, Settler Colonial; The Palestine Exception: Epistemic Ruptures and Academic Freedom.
AVAILABLE TO speak in person, speak online, speak at hybrid event, consult on these issues
Maura Finkelstein, France
EXPERTISE: Zionist repression (particularly on US college and university campuses); Hillel International; Academic freedom; Palestine in the classroom.
DETAILS
Maura Finkelstein is a writer and anthropologist. She is the author of The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai (Duke University Press, 2019). Her academic writing has also been published in American Anthropologist, Anthropological Quarterly, City and Society, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology Now, and the Anthropology of Work Review. Her essays on Palestine and anti-Zionism have appeared in Red Pepper Magazine, Allegra Lab, The Markaz Review, The Scottish Left Review, Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye, The New Arab, and Al Jazeera. She is the recipient of the 2024 New Directions Award from the General Anthropology Division (GAD) of the American Anthropological Association and the 2024 Courageous Voices Fellowship from the Scholars for Social Justice Executive Committee and the Advisory Committee for the Freedom and Justice Institute.
AVAILABLE TO speak in person, speak online, speak at hybrid event, consult on these issues
Cynthia Franklin, University of Hawai’i
EXPERTISE: Zionist repression, Palestine solidarity (particularly from Hawai’i to Palestine), Academic Boycott, Zionist discourses of dehumanization, the place of Palestine in American studies, Life writing and Palestine, Why Life Writing Scholars Must Address the Nakba, the Humanities after Gaza, Decolonial Love and Anti-Zionist Resistance.
DETAILS
Barry Trachtenberde.
AVAILABLE TO speak in person, speak online, speak at hybrid event, consult on these issues
Cynthia Franklin is Professor of English at the University of Hawai’i, and coeditor of the journal Biography. She is the author of Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea (Fordham UP, 2023), Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory and the University Today (Georgia UP, 2009) and Writing Women’s Communities: The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Multi-Genre Anthologies (U of Wisconsin P, 1997). Essays, interviews and review articles also appear in journals including American Quarterly, Biography, Cultural Critique, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Life Writing, LIT, The Contemporary Pacific, Against the Current, Jadaliyya.
Edited collections include, with Ibrahim Aoude and Morgan Cooper, a special issue of Biography, “Life in Occupied Palestine,” available for free download on Project MUSE: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/31638. Franklin is also a member of the newly established Editorial Collective for EtCH (Essays in the Critical Humanities).
From 2013-2025, Franklin was part of the Organizing Collective of USACBI, the US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. She has worked on academic boycott initiatives for the ASA and MLA. She also founded UH Faculty and Students for Justice in Palestine, and co-founded Jewish Voice for Peace-Hawai’i. In spring 2018, she did a short-term residency at Al-Quds University and served on a team that developed a partnership between Al-Quds and UH.
Emmaia Gelman, New York City
EXPERTISE: Political history of the left & right; race, queerness, rights, and safety; racism and the “hate” framework; the Anti-Defamation League; Jewish anti-Zionism; academic repression.
DETAILS
Emmaia Gelman is the founding Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which examines the political and ideological work of Zionist institutions beyond their direct advocacy for Israel. She earned her PhD in NYU’s American Studies program in 2021, and has taught at NYU and Sarah Lawrence College. Her research looks into the history of ideas about race, queerness, safety, and rights, and their production as political levers in the realm of hate crimes policy, surveillance, anti-terror measures, and war. Emmaia is at work on a critical history of the Anti-Defamation League (1913-1990) as a Cold War neoconservative institution, and is co-editing a collection of writings on the ADL’s intrusions into popular movements. She is the co-chair of the American Studies Association Caucus on Academic and Community Activism, and a longtime activist in New York City on Palestine, policing, antiracism, and queer issues.
AVAILABLE TO speak in person, speak online, speak at hybrid event, consult on these issues
Terri Ginsberg, New York City
EXPERTISE: Interrelated history of Zionism, racism, antisemitism, colonialism, and capitalism
Palestine cinema, Arab cinema, hasbara film; contemporary critical and cultural (including queer) theory in relation to Palestine.
DETAILS
Terri Ginsberg is Director of Research and Academic Affairs at the International Association of Middle Eastern Studies (IAMES) and was most recently Assistant Professor of Film and Media at Concordia University in Montréal. Before that, she taught film at the American University in Cairo, where she also served for three years as Director of the Film Program. She earned her doctorate in cinema studies at New York University and has also taught film, media, literary, and cultural studies at Rutgers University, NYU, Dartmouth College, Ithaca College, SUNY-Purchase and the City University of New York. Her areas of scholarly expertise include Palestinian and Palestine solidarity cinema, German Cinema, Holocaust film, Marxism and critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, and methods of academic pedagogy and institutional critique. Her book-length publications include a recent short monograph, Films of Arab Loutfi and Heiny Srour: Studies in Palestine Solidarity Cinema (November 2021); a multi-authored, co-edited encyclopedia, Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema (2010; 2nd ed. 2020); two earlier monographs, Visualizing the Palestinian Struggle: Towards a Critical Analytic of Palestine Solidarity Film (2016) and Holocaust Film: The Political Aesthetics of Ideology (2007); and three co-edited collections, Cinema of the Arab World: Contemporary Directions in Theory and Practice (2020), A Companion to German Cinema (2012), and Perspectives on German Cinema (1996). She has also published numerous articles and reviews in peer-reviewed anthologies and academic journals, some of which she has co-edited in the form of special issues, including Arab Studies Quarterly (co-ed. 2011), Situations (co-ed. 2011), International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies (2009; 2016), Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World (co-ed. 2024), Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Review of Middle East Studies, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Spectator, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Textual Practice, Genders, GLQ, Journal of the History of Sexuality, and the edited volume Teaching Transnational Cinema. Additionally, she wrote the scholarly essay that accompanies Olive Films’ remastered Blu-ray version of Playing for Time (starring Vanessa Redgrave) and is co-editor of the scholarly academic book series, Cinema and Media Cultures in the Middle East (Peter Lang). Ginsberg has served as co-chair of several caucuses of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, including the Middle East Caucus, the Caucus on Class, the Queer Caucus, and the Caucus Coordinating Committee, and was an appointed member of the SCMS Task Force on Global Inclusivity. She also serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World (Intellect), and on the organizing collective of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). In addition to scholarly writing, she has blogged for Arabisto, ZNet, Mondoweiss and The Electronic Intifada, and written film reviews for Cinéaste. Her co-curated art exhibition, “Robert Colescott: The Cairo Years,” was nominated by Artforum International in its “Best of 2021” special issue. Her most recent project is a co-edited collection on the governmentalization of international film education.
AVAILABLE TO speak in person, speak online, speak at hybrid event, consult on these issues
Christine Hong, Central Coast/Bay Area, CA
EXPERTISE: Ethnic studies, Zionist repression, racism, safety discourse, Korea-Palestine solidarity, U.S. militarism.
DETAILS
Christine Hong is Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Literature and director of the Center for Racial Justice at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of A Violent Peace: Race, Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific (Stanford UP, 2020). Along with Deann Borshay Liem, she co-directed the Legacies of the Korean War oral history project. She serves on the board of directors of the Korea Policy Institute, an independent research and educational institute, co-edits the Critical Ethnic Studies journal, and co-chairs the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council. She also co-edited a two-volume thematic issue of Critical Asian Studies on Reframing North Korean Human Rights (2013-14); a special issue of positions: asia critique on The Unending Korean War (2015); and a forum of The Abusable Past on White Terror, “Red” Island: A People’s Archive of the Jeju 4.3 Uprising and Massacre.
AVAILABLE TO speak in person, speak online, speak at hybrid event, consult on these issues.
Jennifer Lynn Kelly, Santa Cruz, CA
EXPERTISE: Palestine, U.S. empire, tourism, solidarity, militarism, witnessing, pinkwashing, U.S. Christian Zionism, the global right.
DETAILS
Jennifer Lynn Kelly is an Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research broadly engages questions of settler colonialism, U.S. empire, and the fraught politics of both tourism and solidarity. Her first book, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine (Duke University Press, 2023), a multi-sited interdisciplinary study of solidarity tourism in Palestine that draws from archival research on past and present delegations to Palestine and ethnographic research she completed as a 2012-2013 and 2019-2020 Palestinian American Research Center Fellow. In her project, she analyzes the ways in which solidarity tourism has emerged in Palestine as an organizing strategy that is both embedded in and working against histories of sustained displacement. Her next project, co-edited with Somdeep Sen (Rothskilde University) and Lila Sharif (Arizona State University) is Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine, an edited volume in the Detours Series at Duke University Press. She is also a founding collective member of the Institute for Critical the Study of Zionism and UCSC’s chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine.
AVAILABLE TO speak in person, speak online, speak at hybrid event, consult on these issues
Arun Kundnani, Philadelphia
EXPERTISE: Racism, Islamophobia, surveillance, political violence, counter-terrorism.
DETAILS
Arun Kundnani is a writer based in Philadelphia. He is the author of “What is Antiracism?” (Verso, 2023), “The Muslims are Coming!” (Verso, 2014) and “The End of Tolerance” (Pluto, 2007). He has written for the Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Vice, and The Intercept. A former editor of the journal Race & Class, he was educated at Cambridge University, and holds a PhD from London Metropolitan University. He is currently working on a biography of Jamil Al-Amin.
AVAILABLE TO speak in person, speak online, speak at hybrid event, consult on these issues
Alana Lentin, Sydney, Australia
EXPERTISE: The politicisation of antisemitism; Zionism and the war on critical race theory; Antiracism and anti-Zionism in Europe (UK, France, Germany) and Australia; Zionist manipulations of Indigeneity and Indigenous resistance in Australia.
DETAILS
Teacher and writer, Alana Lentin is a Jewish anti-Zionist European woman who is a settler on Gadigal-Wangal land. She works on the critical theorization of race, racism and antiracism. Her latest book is Why Race Still Matters (Polity 2020) and she is finalizing her new book The New Racial Regime: White Supremacy Recalibrated (Pluto 2025). Previously she published The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a neoliberal age with Gavan Titley (Zed, 2011), Racism: A Beginner’s Guide (2008) and Racism and Antiracism in Europe (Pluto, 2004). She co-edits the Lexington Books ‘Challenging Migration Studies’ books series and the ‘Decolonization and Social Worlds’ series at Bristol University Press. She is a founding committee member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Her academic and media articles as well as videos, podcasts, and teaching materials are free to be used and available at http://www.alanalentin.net.
AVAILABLE TO speak in person, speak online, speak at hybrid event, consult on these issues
Sean Malloy, California (Bay Area)
EXPERTISE: ethnic studies; Zionist organizations; IHRA; the “new antisemitism”; DEI and Zionism; faculty governance; academic freedom.
DETAILS
Sean L. Malloy is a Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) at the University of California, Merced and a member of the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council and UC Faculty for Justice in Palestine. He is the author of Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan (Cornell University Press, 2008) and Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2017). His current research project examines the countermobilization against Palestinian solidarity efforts at U.S. universities.
AVAILABLE TO speak in person, speak online, speak at hybrid event
Jamal Nabulsi, Magandjin/Brisbane, Australia
EXPERTISE: Zionist settler colonialism, Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty, Indigenous-Palestinian solidarities, affect and power.
DETAILS
Dr Jamal Nabulsi is a diaspora Palestinian writer, researcher, and organiser. He is currently a Research Fellow at Griffith University. He is a Founding Collective Member of the Institute for Collaborative Race Research, a Global Indigenous Member of the Centre for Global Indigenous Futures at Macquarie University, and a Member of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. He has published his research in academic journals such as Antipode, Human Geography, Journal of Palestine Studies, and Review of International Studies; in edited volumes such as the forthcoming Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine (Duke University Press); and has provided expert commentaries in outlets such as Al-Shabaka and The New Arab. He has received national and international research awards, including the 2024 Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Early Career Paper Prize from the British International Studies Association (BISA), the 2024 Cultural Geography Early Career Paper Prize from the Institute of Australian Geographers, and the 2023 BISA Emotions Thesis Prize. He regularly speaks publicly on his work, in both academic and activist forums.
AVAILABLE TO speak online, speak at hybrid event, consult on these issues
Dylan Rodríguez, California
EXPERTISE:
DETAILS
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AVAILABLE TO speak in person, speak online, speak at hybrid event, consult on these issues
Heike Schotten, Boston, MA
EXPERTISE: Racialization of religion as an early modern phenomenon; Empires and Nation-States: Evolving Landscapes of Exclusion; Historical Landscapes of Palestine: Ottoman Imperial, Colonial, Settler Colonial; The Palestine Exception: Epistemic Ruptures and Academic Freedom.
DETAILS
Zionism and the War on Terror; “terrorism” discourse; pinkwashing and the global social/solidarity movement fighting it; Zionism and/as Right-wing politics; Zionism and Islamophobia; the BDS movement; queer theory/politics and Palestine; TERFism and Zionism.
AVAILABLE TO speak in person, speak online, speak at hybrid event, consult on these issues
Lara Sheehi, Doha & USA
EXPERTISE: Psychic processes (mental health effects, psychological intrusions, psyops); settler colonial logics (with specific focus on reality bending); academic repression.
DETAILS
Lara Sheehi (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar, and a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa’s Institute for Social and Health Sciences. She is the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. Lara’s work takes up decolonial and anti-oppressive approaches to psychoanalysis, with a focus on liberation struggles in the Global South. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022) which won the Middle East Monitor’s 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is the President of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39) and co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Lara is on the advisory board for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network and a member of the founding collective for the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. She is currently working on a new book, From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures (Pluto Press).
AVAILABLE TO speak in person, speak online, speak at hybrid event, consult on these issues
Barry Trachtenberg, North Carolina
EXPERTISE: Israel’s assault on Palestine as a Genocide; Antisemitism & anti-Zionism; US support for Israel, Definitions of Antisemitism.
DETAILS
Barry Trachtenberg is a historian of modern European and American Jewish history and the Nazi Holocaust, and a member of the Academic Advisory Boards of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and Jewish Voice for Peace. He is the author of The Holocaust and the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye (Rutgers University Press, 2022); The United States and the Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance (Bloomsbury Press, 2018); and The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917 (Syracuse University Press, 2008).
He writes occasional pieces and lecture on the topics of Zionism, antisemitism, and US support for Israel. These have appeared in forums such as the Forward, Tablet, Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss, Die Tageszeitung (German), A2larm (Czech), and La Razón (Spanish).
In 2017, he testified to the US Congress on the topic of antisemitism on college and university classrooms. In 2023, he submitted with colleagues expert testimony on a lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights seeking an emergency order to stop military and diplomatic support for Israeli government’s genocidal assault on Gaza and in 2024 testified in the trial DCI-Palestine v. Biden, making the case that Israel’s assault on Gaza constitutes a genocide.
AVAILABLE TO speak in person, speak online, speak at hybrid event, consult on these issues
For more information: https://wfu.academia.edu/BarryTrachtenberg.
Anna Younes, Amman, Jordan
EXPERTISE: Theories and Realities of Race; Settler Colonialism; Germany and Race; Anti-Jewish, Anti-Muslim, & anti-Palestinian racism; Psychoanalysis and Race; The War on Antisemitism.
DETAILS
Anna Younes (PhD) is an independent researcher, writer, and organiser. Her main foci are settler/colonialism, psychoanalysis, race critical theories and counterinsurgencies. She has published on what she calls the “War on Antisemitism” in Germany and Europe – a counterinsurgency war in the wake of the War on Terror. She also works on settler colonialism in the Caribbean, and has been actively engaged with the ELSC (the European Legal Support Center aiding those affected by anti-Palestinian repression in Europe) as consultant and policy writer.
AVAILABLE TO speak in person, speak online, speak at hybrid event, consult on these issues