Research

Dissertation

My dissertation, entitled “A Very Narrow Bridge: Jewish Americans and the Palestine Solidarity Movement,” addresses the complexity of Jewish American positionality within liberal, progressive, and leftist social movements for Israel/Palestine through a rich and comprehensive ethnography of IfNotNow, an American Jewish organization founded in 2014. Through my dissertation, I examine how American Jews understand their own racial and political positionality, how they are understood by others in the social justice movements they seek to be a part of, and how American racial and activist frameworks constrain these movements.

My dissertation makes three core arguments. First, I argue that American Jewish activists are primarily motivated by feelings of betrayal and anger towards the Jewish establishment, which leads these activists to focus more on changing the American Jewish communities from which they came than changing material conditions for Palestinians living under occupation. Second, I argue that tensions around Jewishness within the Palestine Solidarity Movement stem from the ways that American racial frameworks and U.S.-centric anxieties about power, privilege, and oppression are falsely placed onto Israel/Palestine. Third, I argue that through focusing on Israel/Palestine, American Palestine Solidarity activists often ignore their own complicity in American settler colonialism by becoming activists on an issue that does not require them to make material sacrifices. 

My research is one of the first studies to bring the fields of Arab American and Jewish American Studies together. In bringing these fields into conversation, my dissertation demonstrates the interconnectedness between antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism, revealing how the contemporary impulse to read antisemitism and Islamophobia as being antipathetic plays into the broader goals of White Christian nationalism. Despite the similarities in how Arab American Studies and Jewish American studies address and challenge traditional frameworks of racism and racialization, the fields are rarely in conversation with one another; rather, they are often in competition and conflict. Through my interdisciplinary education and scholarship, which draws on literary analysis, black feminist theory, and feminist ethnography - both methodologically and theoretically - I offer a multidimensional perspective and approach to my scholarship. As a scholar in Judaic Studies, Arab and Muslim American Studies, and American Studies, I approach my research with deep familiarity of the intellectual, cultural, political and emotional attachments to this work.