In this Teach-In, John J. Mearsheimer addresses Israel’s apartheid state, the catastrophe in Gaza, regional reverberations, and the role of the Israel lobby in contemporary U.S. politics. What is unfolding in Gaza and beyond, and what might the future hold? 

 

 

John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He graduated from West Point (1970), has a PhD in political science from Cornell University (1981), and has written extensively about security issues and international politics. Among his seven books, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001, 2014) won the Joseph Lepgold Book Prize and has been translated into nine languages; The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (with Stephen M. Walt, 2007), made the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into twenty-five languages; and The Great Delusion: Liberal Ideals and International Realities (2018), won the 2019 Best Book of the Year Award from the Valdai Discussion Conference, Moscow and has been translated into nine languages. His latest book is How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy (with Sebastian Rosato, 2023). He has also written numerous articles and op-eds that have appeared in International Security, The Economist, The London Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, The Financial Times, and The New York Times. In 2003, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2020, he won the James Madison Award, which is given once every three years by the American Political Science Association to “an American political scientist who has made a distinguished scholarly contribution to political science.”

 

Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science and the College and the Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. She is also Associate Faculty in Anthropology and the Co-Editor of the University of Chicago Book Series, “Studies in Practices of Meaning.” Her publications include three books: Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999; with a new preface, 2015); Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power and Performance in Yemen (2008); and Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (2019). Among her articles are the following: “Conceptualizing ‘Culture’: Possibilities for Political Science” (2002); “Concepts and Commitments in the Study of Democracy” (2004), “Ethnography as an Interpretive Enterprise” (2009), “Reflections on Ethnographic Work in Political Science” (2010), “Ideology and Humor in Dark Times: Notes from Syria” (2013), and “Scientific Knowledge, Liberalism, and Empire: American Political Science in the Modern Middle East” (2016). She is the recipient of the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award and an NSF fellowship, and is currently completing an edited volume with Joseph Masco, entitled Conspiracy/Theory.