Bassam Haddad is Founding Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the acclaimed series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam is Executive Producer of Status Podcast Channel and Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI). He received MESA's Jere L. Bacharach Service Award in 2017 for his service to the profession. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book titled Understanding The Syrian Tragedy: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).
Season 48 Episode 4:
How to Critique Israel Without Being Smeared Antisemitic?
Featuring:
Sinan Antoon
Adel Iskandar
Bassam Haddad
Guest Host:
Mouin Rabbani
Wednesday, 26 February 2025
2:00 PM EST
Israel is impossible to criticize because of its unparalleled democracy, glowing human rights record, and the goodwill it spreads around the world, not least in Gaza. Despite its blemish-free record, sometimes it is healthy to offer some constructive feedback so that Israel can fine tune its impeccable governance model.
In this 4th Episode of Season 48 Emergency Teach Ins we demonstrate how one can consider attempting to contemplate the unfathomable possibility of perhaps critiquing Israel and its policies maybe without running the risk of being smeared as Antisemitic in America. We provide elaborate teaching guides and data-driven models you can use to navigate this precarious terrain.
Featuring expert hosts of “3Arabs&,” Bassam Haddad, Sinan Antoon, and Adel Iskandar, a multinational triglyceride think tank that provides satirical dilution to contemporary banalities.
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Featuring
Mouin Rabbani is a researcher, analyst, and commentator specialising in Palestinian affairs, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the contemporary Middle East. He has among other positions previously served as Principal Political Affairs Officer with the Office of the UN Special Envoy for Syria, Head of Middle East with the Martti Ahtisaari Peace Foundation, and Senior Middle East Analyst and Special Advisor on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group. Rabbani is Co-Editor of Jadaliyya, and a Contributing Editor of Middle East Report
Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, scholar and translator. He has published five novels and two collections of poetry. A third collection of poetry in English, entitled Postcards from the Underworld, was published by Seagull Books this past October. He has been described as one of the most acclaimed Arab novelists. His most recent work in Arabic is a novel entitled, Khuzama
His literary translations from Arabic include Saadi Youssef’s Nostalgia; My Enemy and Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence which won the National Translation Award given by the American Literary Translators Association. His scholarly works include the book, Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf: The Poetics of the Obscene in Pre-Modern Arabic Poetry. He is associate professor at New York University. He is co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya.
Adel Iskandar is an Associate Professor of Global Communication at Simon Fraser University, where he is the Director of the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies and the Chair of Graduate Studies in the School of Communication. He is the author, co-author and co-editor of numerous works including Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation(University of California Press, 2010). Iskandar is a Co-Editor of Jadaliyya.