Palestine-Israel: Utopia and Dystopia
Please join us Wednesday, April 16, 2025, 4-5:30pm-Herter 301 for a panel discussion: Palestine-Israel: Utopia and Dystopia with esteemed guests, Professor, Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani-Chief Editor of Maktoob (Arabic Literature in Hebrew) and Professor, Honaida Ghanim- Director, Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies (MADAR)
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Notions of utopia and dystopia have long provided cultural spaces for imagining the future and reconceiving the present. This panel will address both Palestinian and Israeli imaginings of utopia and dystopia, with a specific focus on the accelerating shift from dystopia to apocalypse in the last two decades. Thinking with and through a variety of frameworks including settler coloniality, political theology, and states of emergency and exception, it will move between literature and life to engage with a major question: Is it still possible to avert a complete collapse of all forms of non-aggressive resolutions for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?
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About the speakers:
Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani
Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani (Ph.D Stanford University 1985) is Professor of Sociology at Tel-Aviv University. His main areas of research and teaching are social theory, sociology of knowledge, postcolonial theory, and society in Israel. He was editor of Theory and Criticism (2000-2010), and held several visiting professorships in the US, including ones at Princeton and Columbia. He was the head of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute for advanced study (2005-2010). His many books and scholarly articles include Manufacturing Rationality: The Engineering Foundations of the Managerial Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1999); The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Ethnicity and Religion (Stanford University Press, 2006); and Beyond the Two States Solution: A Jewish Political Essay (Polity Press, 2012). Prof. Shenhav has also translated into Hebrew books by Arab writers, such as Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury (Lebanon), She, Me and the Autumn; The Life and death of the Wrinkled Face’s Sheikh by Salman Natour (Palestine-Israel), and Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif (Iraq).
Honaida Ghanim
Honaida Ghanim (PhD the Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2004) is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Birzeit University in Palestine. Her research focuses on the interconnectedness of symbolic and ideological forms of oppression in Palestine-Israel, specifically in relation to the two main strategies of occupation: Palestine as a physically empty space (removal of Palestinian Arabs from their land) and a politically empty space (removal of any Palestinian political power or meaningful representation). Since 2009, she has been the general director of the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies “MADAR,” based in Ramallah, and she issues MADAR’s yearly Strategic Report. Prof. Ghanim has published articles and studies in the fields of political and cultural sociology and gender studies. Her books include Reinventing the Nation: The Palestinian Intellectuals in Israel (Hebrew University Press, 2009), and On the Meaning of a Jewish State (MADAR, 2014). Between 2000 and 2011, she was the chief editor of the quarterly journal Qadaya Israeliyya (Israeli Affairs). She has lectured in various settings and in many universities in Palestine, Israel, Europe and the US.
The events are sponsored by – Smith College: Department of Religion, Middle East Studies Program, Jewish Studies Program, Lewis Global Studies Center, and Lecture Committee; Amherst College: Anthropology Department and Office of DEI; UMass Amherst: Program in Comparative Literature and Department of English; Five College Consortium: Five College Lecture Fund and Middle East Studies Faculty Seminar. Further endorsements from the World Literatures and Translation Studies programs at Smith College.