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What’s happening in Gaza? As the conflict unfolds, the territory, home to more than 2 million people, is running out of food and water. It has no electricity, and its hospitals are on the verge of collapse. Meanwhile, the US has emerged as a key actor amidst the crisis. As people living in the US therefore, we have a responsibility to learn about its history and its present.

Award-winning scholars Nadia Abu El Haj (Barnard College) and Amahl Bishara (Tufts University), who specialize in the Middle East, will share their research and unpack the historical and contemporary trajectories of the current moment.

El-Haj is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (U of Chicago, 2001) and The Genealogical Sciences: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (U of Chicago, 2012). Amahl Bishara’s first book, Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford UP, 2012) is an ethnography of U.S. news production about uprisings in the Middle East. Her second, Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression (Stanford 2022), studies the relationship between Palestinian citizens of Israel and those in the West Bank.

Cosponsors: Department of American Studies, Department of Anthropology, Program on Ethnicity Race & Migration (ER&M), Department of Religious Studies, Program on Women Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS), Center for Middle East Studies,  Yale Ethnography Hub, Black Feminist Collective, Yalies4Palestine, Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund