Episode 10 - Maura Finkelstein

Listeners may have heard Maura on a special episode we aired last year about academic freedom and Palestine. In this episode, Maura returns for a more in depth conversation about her educational journey in the Palestine solidarity movement. We discuss her being fired from her tenured position and hear stories from her everyday classroom practice. She offers a glimpse of her time as a principled high school student encountering Edward Said's work and reminds of a need to be as loud and forceful as possible in the fight for Palestinian liberation.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to another Education as Possible, a podcast about education's radical potential.

(00:06):
I'm your host, Jordan Corson.
Today's guest, Maura Finkelstein, was actually on a bonus episode that we aired back in November
of 2024.
And Maura's also been in the news and interviewed in many places, and she was fired from her
tenured position for speaking out against the genocide.
And we get into what happened with her job during the interview, and we also don't want

(00:29):
to just retread what Maura has said in so many places.
So why have her on twice?
Well, I'd like to read something that she wrote.
Teaching can be transformative.
It can be revolutionary.
It can open up spaces of liberation.
If we are doing our jobs, if we are really teaching, then the work we are doing is not

(00:52):
just conveying information and assigning grades.
Rather, we are helping our students think about the world in ways they have never been able
to do before.
When we are really teaching, we are imagining a world otherwise, alongside our students.
So again, if our listeners are familiar with Maura and her situation, she was fired from

(01:16):
a tenured position, and it's a classroom where she was teaching directly about Palestine.
And as an educator, it grieves me to think about what is lost when we don't have people
like Maura in formalized spaces, or say the Philadelphia teacher, Kasiah Ridgway, or many,
many more who Zionist forces have tried to silence and expel from spaces of education,

(01:42):
where we really need people to be doing exactly what Maura says.
Thinking and imagining a world otherwise with our students.
So today's episode traces Maura's educational journey.
It includes some of her beautifully challenging high school teachers, what she learned on
a trip to Palestine, and most specifically, we go into her classroom.

(02:06):
We look at what her teaching about Palestine looks like, and the conversation situates
us.
It roots us in the everyday pedagogies of teaching Palestine in a college classroom, and what
possibilities emerge from that.
An important note here.
This episode was recorded at the end of 2024.
We're now recording this introduction in early 2025, just after the announcement of

(02:29):
the ceasefire.
I don't have much to offer beyond what's already been said and said better than I could ever
say it, but I'd like to remind and encourage the work of Palestinian liberation continues.
That's very easy for someone like me to say right now, but I think we should also remember
that in six months when the Trump administration is doing another awful thing and we feel crushed

(02:54):
by the everyday burden of capitalism.
And I'm speaking specifically to US Jews here.
This moment marks perhaps the end of a prologue for many of us.
Let's now recommit and strengthen our work.
The right of return.
The need for struggle and resistance.
The fight for Palestinian liberation from the river to the sea and the educational work

(03:15):
that feeds the struggle continues.
And here's more.

(03:42):
More finkl scene.
Welcome to another education as possible.
Great to have you on.
Thank you.
It's so wonderful to be here.
It's a real honor.
It's an honor to have you.
I feel like I have to start in this very selfish place of just asking my fellow 90s child,
how did you escape Zionism?

(04:02):
Because you and I spoke and you said, you know, I'm happy to chat, but I've never been
Zionist.
So I didn't unlearn Zionism and I, it's almost inconceivable to me as a Northeast Jew who
grew up in the 90s to imagine how that would be possible.
Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about how I would answer that question.
Because on the one hand, I would say that I as a child resisted anything that seemed

(04:32):
normative or like group thinking.
I mean, it's funny that I became an anthropologist.
I don't know if I presented this way, but I understood myself as an outsider.
Any time I saw a lot of people buying into something, I was like, that's something I
should resist.
It made it probably very annoying to raise me.

(04:57):
I had lots of different ways of learning this.
I became a vegetarian when I was eight and a vegan when I was 16.
So I, you know, a lot of my childhood was resisting power in these like very intimate
kind of ways somewhat in my kitchen growing up.
And those were really good lessons.
My father was a lawyer.

(05:18):
He's retired.
But a lot of the sort of practice growing up was that if I could make an argument and
defend myself, I could do things.
So I like read Diet for a New America when I was like nine and like argued my case in
front of my father.
And so, you know, in, in terms of sort of like learning how to set myself against the

(05:44):
stream or normative practices, I had a really nice foundation in practicing these kinds
of things.
Zionism was a little tricky because I grew up going to really like I went to public high
school, I went to public school in Maryland, but I grew up going to religious school from

(06:04):
kindergarten through sophomore year of high school.
I was bought mitzvahd.
I was confirmed.
And I hated it.
And I hated going.
I hated everything about it.
There was very little space of joy or connection for me there.
And I've spent a lot of time thinking about what that was about.
And I think it was partially the sort of centrality of Holocaust education that I felt like really

(06:32):
alienated by.
And just sort of even as a small child, I just remember feeling scared a lot of the
time, but not because of the Holocaust.
And like this is something that happened to Jewish people, but just this is something
that people do to other people.

(06:52):
And so I thought a lot about that in sort of a larger context, even when I remember in
elementary school and middle school.
And I remember even like hearing about the Rwandan genocide and very much understanding
that there were connections there.
And I can't remember quite how I was making those connections, but I was making those

(07:14):
connections.
And I had the sort of luck of having parents who were not Zionists in any kind of active
practice.
I think in the way that Zionism is sort of this passive form of power and knowledge that
passes through pretty much all Americans, especially Jewish Americans, I think that
that sort of mentality built in the 90s influenced my parents, but they never wanted me to go

(07:40):
to Israel.
They never wanted me to feel a connection to it.
And I think that if anything, when we would talk about Israel, it would be that very violent
place over there that I hope you never go to.
So there was a distance there, even though I would go to the synagogue where I grew up,
Temple Sinai on Military Road in Washington, DC.
And I remember all of a sudden there were Israeli flags everywhere we stand with Israel.

(08:03):
I remember very much seeing that come to be when I was a teenager.
I think when I was 13 or 14, I remember my Hebrew teacher telling me that she had been
in the Israeli military.
And I remember not liking her.
I remember feeling like she was, you know, she I was a good student, but I did not like

(08:29):
being in her class.
There was something that felt really aggressive about her.
And I remember as sort of associating that with the fact that she had been in the Israeli
military and that that was something that was very scary to me.
And it was the first time I really thought about the sort of centrality of the Israeli
military to the Israeli project.
And the second thing, and you know, I'll tell the story because I think it's really important,

(08:54):
but it was the first time I ever really thought about Palestine in any kind of way, because
you know, I've heard other conversations with folks on the show and other anti-Zionist
Jews that I know that, you know, it takes a really long time to get to Palestine in anti-Zionist
understandings, but you know, the connection to Israel is sort of there.

(09:15):
And I think for me, the first sort of awareness of Zionism was actually a connection to learning
about Palestine.
And so in my senior year of high school was just this incredibly transformative year for
me.
I was 16 and 17 years old.
And I took a series of classes that sort of changed my life.

(09:36):
And there were two teachers that I had that really changed my life.
So you know, when I think about education and learning and studying, I think about the
transformative teachers in my life who sort of gave me the tools I needed to get free.
And those two teachers, my senior year of high school, were James Bedrin, who was a
history teacher, Mr. Bedrin, and Coleman McCarthy, who was this Washington Post reporter

(10:01):
anarchist, peace activist, who taught this class called peace studies in the spring of
senior year, you would apply for it.
And what happened for me through these like modules of education is that in my like the
fall of my senior year, I took two classes with Mr. Bedrin that sort of set me up as

(10:22):
the person that I am politically today.
The first was AP European history, where I read Marx for the first time, I read the
Communist Manifesto, and I was sort of assigned to like write a paper and give a presentation
on it.
And I remember reading it with my father.
And you know, we've had disagreements of various levels over the years around Israel and Palestine,

(10:47):
but I remember how important it was for him to read Marx with me and like really struggle
through Marx with me and help me understand what communism was.
And at the same time, Mr. Bedrin taught a class, he was really into live action role
playing before that was a thing.
And he taught this class called that was a Russian history class.

(11:10):
But he set it up where he was bizarre, and we were all serfs in his class.
And he was like, you're all serfs, you're nothing.
If you want any power in this class, you have to become a nobleman.
And you can become a nobleman by kissing up to me by coming early by writing good papers,
by just being a brown noser.

(11:31):
And I was a good kid.
And I was like, I'm going to be a nobleman.
And so I did all the things that I needed to do.
And he was like, you're a woman.
So first you have to become a man.
Then once you become a man, you can become a nobleman.
I should probably like think more critically about this, but I was the last of three nobleman
who became a nobleman.
And I had all of these special privileges.
It was very like nice in class.

(11:53):
I got passes to all of these things.
And then the Russian revolution happened.
And he was like, you three are all dead.
But I'm going to like, instead of killing you, I'm going to bring you into a reeducation
program.
And if you like, if you like serve all of the comrades, you can like come back into the
fold.
And it was just, you know, having that experience alongside reading Marx, I think was a sort

(12:15):
of like awakening of some kind of like class analysis that for me was all about understanding
imperial power and hierarchy.
And that sort of planted a seed in my brain of, you know, be careful of those in power
and be careful of aligning yourself with those in power.

(12:38):
And then in the spring semester, same teacher, Mr. Bedrin taught a Middle East history class.
And it was 1997.
Everybody was high off of Oslo.
And it was set up like a peace talk, because his live action role playing, and he assigned
every student in the class to a country or an entity.

(13:02):
And it was based on power.
And so, you know, 10 students were the United States, eight students were Israel, like three
students were Egypt, two were Jordan.
And I was the one student assigned to Palestine.
And it was an invitation for that semester.
I mean, it was 1997, so like the internet was not what it is now.

(13:23):
But to go learn everything I could about Palestine in order to come to this table and argue on
behalf of Palestine.
And so I went and I read everything I could get on my hands on.
It was the first time I read Edward Said, I read the question of Palestine.
I don't think I understood anything.

(13:43):
Yeah, at 17.
Yeah.
But I think that there's something like I think about all of the things that I read in
high school and I didn't understand a lot of those things, but they were imprinting on
me something very important.
Like I somehow had a copy.
I mean, I still have it of that book.
And I sort of like carried it with me for decades and continue to learn from it.

(14:07):
But it was very important to have that as a teenager and to be learning about Yasser
Arafat and learning about all of the history that I could get my hands on.
And because Mr. Bedrin had sort of set me up to disavow structures and institutions
of power, I was sort of perfectly primed to actually take that really seriously.

(14:31):
And so, you know, I've been thinking about this a lot.
And despite my Jewish community that I always felt really alienated from and didn't understand
that it was this Holocaust education that was like very central and then this like alignment
with Israel that didn't make any sense.
But also, I wouldn't have identified as an anti Zionist at that point because I didn't

(14:54):
have that language.
But I had, you know, Palestinian scholars and writers who I was reading who sort of
gave me a framework to understand power and liberation.
And you know, so I think that sort of shielded me in this otherwise like very Zionist space

(15:15):
in the 90s, where I was learning all of these ways to understand myself in terms of resistance.
And one of those spaces in addition to like capitalism and no American imperialism that
I was learning how to resist with Zionism.
But I think I didn't understand what I was resisting or what I was feeling so unsettled

(15:40):
by until I started reading Palestinian writers.
And they gave me a framework in which to understand what it is that I felt so unsettled by in
what I later understood was my Zionist education.
And so interesting that decades later or many years later, you actually wrote about this

(16:02):
teacher.
Are you still in contact?
Does he know about this?
He doesn't.
He passed away some years ago.
And I was able to, I don't know if I ever like truly was able to tell him how much he
changed my life.
I did see him years after I graduated and had gone through grad school and told him that

(16:24):
he was like one of the main reasons that I pursued higher ed in the way that I did.
He was a very peculiar person.
But I give him a lot of credit.
I think he saw something in me.
He saw something that I wanted and needed.

(16:45):
And he never told me anything.
But he sort of gave me the opportunities to walk through doors that I needed to walk through
or like pick up books that I needed to pick up.
And I've learned a lot about teaching from him and maybe he knows.
And that appears in your writing, right?

(17:06):
You talk about exactly what you just said is how you frame your classrooms.
It's funny too because years later after I started writing about Palestine, I was a little
and I've always been like slightly naive.
I think that it sort of protects me, but also troubles me in certain ways.

(17:27):
I've been to Palestine.
I've been reading.
I know all these things.
I should go and talk to folks at the synagogues and temples and encourage them to sort of
think about this the way I have.
And I don't remember if my parents had reached out to the rabbi at the synagogue at the time.

(17:49):
But her response to me was, I'm very, very troubled with the way that you've been brainwashed.
And that sits with me the way in which I remember seeing the brainwashing of Zionism as a child.
And I've freed myself from it and the response from the rabbi is you've been brainwashed.

(18:11):
Which is not unique, but it is heartening to hear on a podcast about education, a lot
of my life is devoted to fighting for public schools and supporting teachers.
And yet, simultaneously, I'm constantly critiquing the fact that by and large schools are sites
of oppression and critical spaces of all of these things.

(18:34):
But almost everyone we've talked to has talked about, it's just so wonderful to hear you
talk of a teacher who welcomes reading marks, exploring Palestine, and not in a way other
than as you suggested, opening doors for you.
I do wonder where that led.

(18:56):
You're very careful, as we'll talk about soon to say, you are not an expert of Palestine,
but it has remained part of your study, part of your activism, part of your life and work.
Yeah, so, I mean, there's been like a very, I've been very lucky in my life.
I've done a lot of really weird and wild things and I did a lot of them when I was younger,

(19:18):
because now I'm tired.
So, I had this really, I was listening to your episode with Raz and he talks about India
as an important place and it was for me as well in a really different way.
I thought it was going to be a veterinarian and study equine science.
I loved horses and so I ended up at Colorado State, which in terms of, I have another high

(19:44):
school teacher, Coleman, that has, I'll talk about him a bit, he's sort of given me a framework
to understand the position that I'm in now.
But I ended up in Colorado and I was learning how to be an activist and an organizer, mostly
around environmental issues, but I studied abroad in North India and I, for the first

(20:08):
time, was exposed to the impact of Israeli soldiers post-military, not because I was
meeting them, but because I was meeting Kashmiri Muslim communities who were working in North
India, who were like mostly shop owners or selling goods and they would tell me these

(20:33):
stories that, you know, I think on first encounter, I never disclosed that I was Jewish because
it wasn't the most important or interesting thing about me, but they, well, they showed
me a kind of global anti-semitism that had nothing to do with Judaism and had everything
to do with Israel.

(20:54):
And it was really educational to learn that the only Jewish people that these Kashmiri
Muslim traders had ever met were Israeli travelers, post-military, who were sort of
bringing this particular kind of racist Islamophobia everywhere they had gone after, you know, just

(21:17):
serving in an imperial occupation military and showing me the way that Israel is actually
really bad, not, I mean, first and foremost, to Palestinians and second to Jews, that,
you know, not only was, do I believe firmly that Jews are less safe because Israel exists

(21:38):
in the United States and Europe never have to reconcile their anti-semitism because,
you know, Israel is the only reason that you're safe, but also this idea that there
were Israeli soldiers who were traveling, treating local communities really badly and
becoming representative of Judaism.
And it made me really think about the, like, larger impact of the Zionist project and how

(22:01):
it reaches all of these different areas of the world.
And I went back to the same town in North India and lived there after I graduated from
college and would encounter groups of Israelis who were traveling through who really, like,
were reproducing a sort of, you know, colonial culture in India that they were sort of bringing

(22:28):
from Palestine and a sort of aggression and Islamophobia that was impacting the local
communities that I was in.
And so this was, again, like, sort of part of me thinking about, you know, I had majored
in anthropology as an undergrad and I was thinking about these forms of encounters and
what they do and thinking a lot about power.

(22:50):
And that was a really interesting global education of just being in, you know, a country that
seemingly I didn't know about the history of, you know, Hinduism and connection to Zionism
yet, but thinking about this collision.
And then I went to Columbia.
I mean, I'm skipping over.

(23:10):
I joined the Peace Corps.
I quit the Peace Corps.
I was like, I'm done with American imperialism.
And I went to Columbia to get a master's.
It's like 2004, 2005.
Joseph Massad's tenure is being challenged by a Zionist organization called the David
Project.
And I got involved in activism on campus.

(23:34):
I mean, it's weird to think about like 20 years ago, Columbia once again being the center.
But the organizers, the students that I connected with again were not Jewish, but they were
Palestinian, they were Arab, they were Muslim and they taught me a new form.
I sort of first encountered the language of anti-Zionism.

(23:55):
It was the first time I actually identified in that way as a sort of form of resistance.
And it, you know, going from high school and reading Palestinian scholars to going to India
and sort of seeing the impact of Israeli imperial mentality on Qajmeri Muslims to being at Columbia
and organizing with Palestinian and other Arab students.

(24:19):
I think my sense of anthropology as like, where are we rooting our stories?
Where are we getting, you know, who are the experts in the stories that we are invested
in?
I think that was like really sealing the both methodology and pedagogy that I would want
as an anthropologist and as a teacher.
And so I really, you know, whether it be Edward Said or, you know, my friends at Columbia

(24:43):
or, you know, my friends in North India, I feel like the lessons that I really learned
over, you know, a decade was very much about like, where do you root expertise?
Who are your teachers?
Who is teaching you about the world?
And I think that's why I ended up getting a PhD in anthropology because I wanted to actually

(25:04):
study how knowledge is produced in really situated, grounded contexts.
And so I went on and got a PhD, not in Palestine though, in India in terms of scholarship.
Just as a fan and nerd, you started in 2004 at Columbia as a master student?

(25:30):
2003.
2003.
So you probably started right after Said passed and were never able to take classes
with him.
But you're right, it is.
So I actually just came back from a weekend at Columbia.
I was staying with a friend on campus and, you know, it's a very, it's where I went to

(25:52):
grad school and it's a very nostalgic place and I love every time I go back.
It's a nice way to kind of think back and reflect on, you know, 10 years that I spent
there.
And this time, I was there for a conference and so I had to get there very, very early
and I get off the subway with about 30, I think it's called Allied Universal.

(26:17):
It's a private security company.
Employees, they all filter out to these kind of stations.
And everybody is positioned to essentially make sure that nobody enters the campus.
And you know, it's just increasingly militarized.

(26:37):
And as you said, it's at the center of so much.
I do think it's worth reading you shared a piece that quotes you from Counterpunch many
years ago.
Where you say, I am Jewish.
I am not a Zionist.
Massad is a man who understands the distinction and does not attempt to conflate the two around

(27:00):
a vague connection with Israel.
Knowing that he is being accused of anti-Semitism is not only slapping his face, it is slapping
the face of every Jew who understands a legacy of oppression and chooses not to become an
oppressor.
So I think that idea of an anti-pressive education, anti-pressive pedagogy, I wonder

(27:23):
where that took you post-Columbia as you went off to continue your graduate studies as you
started becoming a professor.
Yeah.
I mean, it's so funny to revisit that because I guess I was quoted in the college newspaper
in 2004 and then it was reprinted.
And it's just, I think, you know, I will only speak for myself, but sometimes I look back

(27:45):
on the person who I was 20 years ago and I don't remember her at all.
And so I sort of discount what maybe she understood at the time.
And I'm like proud of 24-year-old Mora.
She was like doing the work.
I'm proud of her.
And so when I went on to get a PhD, I had sort of already known that I would do my research

(28:08):
in India.
And I think one of the things that I try to hold on very strongly to another thing that
was happening for me while I was at Columbia is that I was reading revolutionary literature.

(28:30):
I was studying class struggle.
I was organizing alongside students who were part of young socialist networks.
And I was thinking a lot about class and I was thinking a lot about how my understanding
of all struggles is also rooted in class struggle.
And so when I was sort of looking for a PhD project, that's something that I really wanted

(28:55):
to learn about and think about.
And so I ended up doing a dissertation on textile mill workers in Bombay.
And that was a really good education for me in terms of who gets to be the experts and
key storytellers in history because I was working with a community that had sort of

(29:20):
been written out of the contemporary history.
I had sort of been seen as important during the height of Bombay's industrial history
that was understood to have ended in the 80s.
And yet these workers were still present and they were still working and they were still
struggling to have a good life in the city both economically and also sort of effectively

(29:45):
and through recognition.
And I didn't think about the connections there until much later.
I don't think I was actively thinking about how my investment in Palestine and narrative
was informing my anthropological work.
But I think these things are always together.

(30:06):
And so when I was doing my research, I was thinking very much about what meta narratives
do and how they erase inconvenient stories.
And when I started teaching and I didn't really get to teach all that much as a PhD student,
but I was an adjunct for three years after I graduated, which was really hard.

(30:27):
But also I think that there's something to be said about like being overlooked.
I could just teach whatever I wanted.
Nobody was really paying attention to me.
And I was really learning how to think about the connections between different stories and
different histories throughout various regions and histories.
So if I wanted to teach about the erasure of mill workers from Bombay's contemporary

(30:52):
history, then an excellent example would be to think about the erasure from, you know,
erasure of Palestinians from like Israeli history or the history of the region that
is allowed to exist in the United States.
And my classroom was a laboratory in which I felt like I could do that work with my students.
I taught at Mills College for three years in Oakland and had these like really wonderful,

(31:18):
brilliant, radical students who were hungry for stories that hadn't been told before.
And I learned how to teach with them in a sort of like collaborative shared environment.
I mean, I was wildly insecure and terrified that I didn't know enough, but I also felt
like I had these really exceptional students who were generous and curious and reminded

(31:43):
me a lot of them, reminded me a lot of myself when I was young, were like, just give us
the information.
Like we just want to read the information we want to read and think.
And so that commitment of incorporating Palestine as a way for me to learn and as a way for
me to understand how everything I know about the world and everything I think about the

(32:05):
world is sort of relevant and helpful in the context of Palestine.
And if I'm reading Palestinian scholars and scholars of Palestine, they're actually teaching
me how to think about the world along the alignments and commitments that I already
have.
And so it always felt relevant to include, you know, a week or two in which we could

(32:29):
read Palestinian writers and scholars of Palestine.
And my students and I could just sort of show up and be curious and learn together.
That wasn't necessarily the environment that I found at Muhlenberg, but I was really grateful
to have had those three years in which I sort of figured out who I wanted to be as a teacher
before I went to a sort of less experimental context.

(32:51):
I'm wondering how you have two big questions with that.
And one is, I wonder how you play with experimentation because I tell this story almost every semester
in my class about how I used to ask this inquiry based narrative where I said, like, is force

(33:12):
necessary.
And I read this book called, I think it's the Butter Battle, the Butter Up Battle.
It's a Dr. Seuss book about two sides, like a Cold War era arms race thing.
And one side butters the toast one way and one side does the other.
And it's back and forth, one side builds slingshots, the other side gets knives, guns, all the
way up until there's like a device that these two towns are going to blow each other up.

(33:34):
And then Dr. Seuss says the book, like, what should they do?
And turns to the reader and is like, what would you do?
And I facilitate this conversation where my students are like, I think they should understand
each other, they should get along, all these like nice liberal feel good stories.
And I had this one student who said they should blow them up.

(33:55):
And I was like, but child, like you can't, you can't do that.
Like, but that would kill both sides.
He's like, no, they were wrong there.
And I just couldn't kept questioning, questioning, and getting to this idea of, but, but this,
this is not the right answer.
And I always wonder in my own approach to deeply inquiry based learning, deeply experiential

(34:18):
and experimental learning, what happens if a student comes out in favor of empire?
What happens if the conclusion is, you know what?
I, I don't know, this site is kind of a little too radical for me.
I'm, I'm going to end up with a, I'm going to side with some Zionists.
Um, I don't know.
Do you see any limits there or, or is that the, you know, that's also a bit of a crude

(34:42):
way of putting it of like, well, if you leave it open, then they, you know, if you don't
tell them what to think, then they're going to, I don't know, it just, it gets that attention
for me of the limits of education and the limits of, of inquiry.
Yeah.
That's such a great question.
And I'm going to try to answer it in one way.
And I might have to like abandon this and just tell the story.
It's the right answer.

(35:03):
But I had this very humbling experience my first or second year at Muhlenberg.
So my first or second year on the tenure track in my intro class, you know, I had a unit
on Palestine that as a urban anthropologist who studies infrastructure, Palestine provides

(35:24):
like such a great, you know, sort of area study of how infrastructure works, whether
it be, you know, walls or roads or checkpoints or whatnot.
And so I had this one student who just hated everything I was teaching and he would, you

(35:45):
know, I remember being reviewed for like, it must have been my second year because it
was sort of like an off the books second year review in my department chair.
After she had served my class was like, who is that student that just like always has
his hand up?
This is why you're, I mean, I think he was a business major who was really invested
in capitalism being the answer.

(36:07):
And you know, there, I think that he had committed, it seemed very much that he had committed
to a certain worldview, and he wasn't in my class to challenge that or, you know, reconsider
it.
He was in my class to get a credit that he needed to graduate.
And it was just exhausting because constantly disagree, disagree, disagree.

(36:28):
And on the last day of class, after, you know, everybody had like filed out done student evaluations,
he came up to me and he goes, Professor, I just want to let you know that this was the
most difficult challenging class I've ever taken, like everything we read, challenged
everything I thought I knew.

(36:50):
And I just want to let you know that I hated every minute of it.
And I hope that never happens again.
And then he walked out of the class.
And I like, I thought I was about to be like, and I loved it.
And now I'm a socialist.
And of course, that is not what he said.
And you know, I think about him far more than probably he deserves to be thought about, because

(37:10):
I actually have no idea the impact of my class or his education on him.
I mean, our students, you know, they might like cling to the things they that we say
they might embrace them, they might resist them, they might fight them.
But once they leave our classroom, there's very little, it's not it's not often that

(37:31):
we will hear from them about the, you know, afterlife of our class and how it impacted
them and the few times that I have had students reach out to me and I had one particular student
who, you know, was a major, took a bunch of my classes, never seemed entirely on board
with anything.
And, you know, after George Floyd was murdered, reached out to me had long since graduated

(37:59):
and he was like, you know, I know I was really like always sort of pushing back and arguing
and whatever, but then I realized that you would actually given me a framework to understand
what was going on.
And I didn't even realize that I had it, but then I had it and, you know, thank you.
And I think about those two students of like, we don't we don't know what the impact of

(38:20):
being in a class in which they're challenged with material and there may be challenged
in a way that they're performing their discomfort and their resistance.
And there are students who may never think about that class again, and there are students
that might be changed by it.
And I think as an educator, my job is both to hold space for all of my students, regardless

(38:43):
of whether or not we agree or not, but in a way that can protect my vulnerable students
from the violence that perhaps that discomfort of certain students being played out might
do, but also to sort of press that, you know, the the timeline of learning is far longer

(39:06):
than the classroom.
And if we are providing material that can perhaps change a worldview or can perhaps be
a tool or whatnot, that doesn't have to happen in the class.
It can happen years later.
It can happen, you know, that summer it can happen 10 years down the line.
And so I try to hold on to that when I feel like I'm not getting through to a student

(39:31):
that maybe like that's not my job.
My job is just to give them the material that they need and a framework and a space in which,
you know, they're encouraged to be entangled with something new and then let them figure
it out down the line if that sort of gets at it.
But you know, it's hard.

(39:53):
It's hard to not, you know, I've been really accused a lot this past year of, you know,
indoctrinating students and having an agenda.
And there's a part of me that's like, do you know how hard I work and how good I think
I am about like not withholding like I tell my students know who I am and they know what

(40:16):
the material is, but at no point are they required in any way to be transformed or agreed
with me in order to do well in that class.
That's not what it's about.
And I think it's a lot of work for those of us who are, you know, teaching hard things
and also trying to provide a space of, you know, to draw on Eli's language study.

(40:37):
And just to play host for a second, you're referring to Eli Meyerhoff or I get, I think
this is the second time I get to say it, friend of the podcast.
Good, good, good, good comrade Eli Meyerhoff.
So yeah, I mean, I frequently say the classroom is an offering and I think that is how you

(40:58):
put it.
It's, I would add to what you said that it's not just that the, that learning is longer.
It's also that it's far less linear.
There might be something years down the road and it might, it's also not rational or directly
causal.
Right, there might be something that 10 years later without any recognition that it's like,

(41:25):
oh, Dr. Finkelstein actually changed something and nobody says it or knows it.
And as I mentioned earlier, you are so intentional about saying you are not a scholar of Palestine.
And yet you've made this direct turn to teaching about studying, writing about Palestine.
And I wonder about most of my books are at my office, but one of the most impactful books

(41:49):
in my work is a scholar of education as this book called the Ignorant School Master by
the philosopher Jacques Ranciere, which is basically saying that things like democracy
and not democracy in the bullshit sense that we have in the US, but actual politics is something
completely unqualified and similarly that education is something that requires no qualification

(42:15):
that anyone can potentially learn and study and think.
And it's not just who powers dictates can do those things.
But I'm wondering how you play with those tensions between saying like, there are people
who are experts, there are people who have deep qualifications and potentially anyone

(42:35):
can take up the work of being anti Zionist, anyone can act in solidarity and you know,
a big part of what I do and how I understand myself is a is through a rejection of expertise.
I'm not, you know, I think as an anthropologist, I'm trained and I think the most important

(42:56):
thing about my training in the and how it impacts the classroom is that there's a particular
kind of methodology that I have been trained in with ethnography.
And I think that there's something really beneficial to my students learning how to
think as critical thinkers by understanding what that methodology is and what it can do.

(43:17):
And there's nothing, you know, I teach about India and I teach about Bombay and I teach
about South Asia and a lot of my classes, often alongside Palestine and often alongside
North America thinking about settler colonialism, those three regions are very linked in my
mind.
But I want my students to learn how to think in a particular kind of way and that's in

(43:38):
a situated, grounded, you know, both theory and methodology that I think ethnography
can give.
And I learned this when I was teaching a class on Palestine, you know, I can catch up, I
can do the reading and I, you know, I'm not trained as a historian or a political scientist.

(44:00):
So I'm not really trained to think through like dates and chronology and statistics,
but I can learn how to do that.
What I'm trained to do is think through, you know, situatedness, story, perspective.
And so it took a long time for me to unteach myself to feel like in order to teach anything

(44:24):
I had to know everything.
And instead to actually go into the classroom and be like, I can give you a rough sketch
of the history of Palestine over the last 100 years.
But actually that's not what we're here to learn.
And my, you know, whether or not I can like quickly give you dates or statistics has nothing

(44:45):
to do with the fact that we're reading this ethnography that's taking you to a particular
place and showing you what it is like to live in an under particular conditions.
And so I think, you know, for me over the past 12 years, there's really been an untraining
of my job as a teacher to be performing expertise and instead to like sort of be welcoming my

(45:09):
students in to think in a particular way with me where they ask me a lot of questions that
I can't answer.
And you know, these days is everybody wants to Google it, and instead it's like, how do
we sit with uncertainty and still know that the people that we're reading, if we're in
this class, we have decided to either trust them.

(45:32):
Or if we don't trust them, like if students are challenging the material that I'm teaching,
then give me some kind of grounded, you know, scholarly based reason why we shouldn't trust
this scholar.
It's not me saying, you know, this is my ethnography, I would never teach my own book that makes
me want to die.
But like, it's not me like giving them my research and being like, you have to believe

(45:55):
me, this is what I know everything about.
And instead of being like, you know, we're reading this book, this person is our expert,
we're sort of as a community, choosing to trust them, and therefore learn from what they have
to teach us together.
And that I think has been the most valuable part of teaching to sort of allow the classroom

(46:21):
for me as well as my students to be a vulnerable space in which, you know, I'm not trying to
pretend like I know everything.
But what I do have is a framework for thinking about the world that's really useful in a
lot of different ways.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm just increasingly enraged on your behalf.

(46:41):
I'm like, Jesus fucking Christ, we need a class.
We need, I want to be in your classroom.
That's, I think that's such an important point that I often come to myself.
I often try to suggest to my students that you can be an anarchist who hates authority
and a hierarchy and get practice of craft.

(47:04):
We can organize around again, not to just fall back on the person I mentioned around
there, but he suggests that you can organize around a thing and you're interested in it
or your desire to engage with it.
And that doesn't put it up on a pedestal above critique, but it allows for a collective
exploration.

(47:25):
So let's, let's go into your classroom.
I think you've written a great deal about this, but just starting to think, how did
this class come to be?
How did you make the turn to thinking, I do want to teach directly a course on Palestine?
The year that I was hired, so it was the spring of 2015 and I would start in the fall.

(47:46):
I had gone out, I had my job talk, I accepted the job and also didn't really understand
where I was going to be living.
And it just so happened that I had plans to go visit my parents in Maryland over Mills
College Spring Break, which was not the same as Muhlenberg College's Spring Break.
And my department chair at the time was like, you know, you might want to come into town

(48:09):
because we're having this event.
And it was this event that in 2015 was making the rounds around the East Coast, most famously
at Swarthmore College, I believe.
But it was a panel of four older Jewish activists who had been active in SNCC.
They had been, you know, civil rights activists when they were young.
And that orientation in the world had led them to be anti-Zionists.

(48:32):
And they were on this tour talking about how they came to center Palestinian liberation
in their activism.
And the Hallel College president at the time, the student president at Muhlenberg, invited
them to come.
And because they were in support of Palestinian liberation, criticized Israel and supported

(48:55):
BDS, boycott, divestment and sanctions, Hallel was like, you can't bring them.
In fact, like we will do everything we can to stop this event.
And as a person in leadership at Hallel, you are not allowed to bring them.
So she very like publicly resigned from Hallel, realigned herself with open Hallel and hosted

(49:15):
this event.
And it was happening over the week that I just happened to be a few hours away.
And I drove up to Allentown for this event.
It was the first time I really understood Hallel as a Zionist organization.
I had never thought about it before, to be honest.
And I had never really thought about the way that it was controlling narrative on college

(49:36):
campuses.
And I went to campus and I encountered at that event, not just the resistance from Hallel
and the way they tried to shut it down, but then students who I later learned had gone
through these Hasbara fellowships in which they learn how to speak on behalf and defend

(49:56):
Israel, which is a whole other thing that is worth talking about.
But I saw them go up to the mic one after another after another and just try to discredit these
activists.
And I was like, what is this campus that I'm coming to?
And so the next two years, I was experimenting with teaching about Palestine.

(50:21):
I got a lot of resistance.
And ended up my third year, there's a lot going on, inviting a Palestinian scholar to
come give a talk on campus.
Once again, Hallel was trying to get it canceled.
They wanted me to promise that the scholar would not talk about BDS.
I was like, the scholar can talk about whatever he wants.

(50:41):
They tried to get it blocked.
They tried to do all of these things.
Again, I saw these students come up to the mic and just try to discredit the scholar
who is also Palestinian, who's from the occupied West Bank, who grew up in Bethlehem, over
and over and over again, tried to deny him his experience.
And so within the context of this friend and scholar, Said Achan, his Swathomour, and seeing

(51:06):
both the way that this panel three years ago had been treating, the way that he was treated,
I started thinking, what would it be like to push against Hallel's control over this
campus?
And I was kind of under the radar, but not really under the radar.
And it was really Said who encouraged me to think about teaching a class.

(51:28):
And as an anthropologist, I was like, I can't teach a class on a place that I've never
been.
So that summer, I went to Palestine as part of a faculty development seminar, spent time
in Palestine, spent time at universities in the occupied West Bank, and really like did

(51:50):
what I could in the short time that I was there to sort of think about how would I bring
the scholarship of the academics in Palestine that I had been meeting, along with scholars
who are in the US, to a classroom space.
And so it was all of this sort of realizing the way that Hallel had such a control over

(52:13):
the narrative on Muehl-Emberg's campus, seeing all of the ways that any centrality or centering
of Palestine would be shut down, realizing that I was the first person at Muehl-Emberg
who had ever brought a Palestinian scholar who was not an active Zionist to campus.
But I was like, this is a place where I, naively, I didn't have tenure yet, but I was Jewish.

(52:34):
And so I thought, you know, who better than a Jewish person to, you know, teach this class
because I can't be accused of anti-Semitism.
So you know, as I mentioned, you've written a lot about this, but you've already shared
some really wonderful stories about your classrooms.

(52:55):
I'd love to go into that classroom.
And are there any stories, encounters with students, texts that you'd like to share about
from your semester's teaching that course?
Yeah, so, I mean, one of the things that I've, I try to do in a lot of my classes, you know,

(53:15):
where many of us are control freaks, we get to write a syllabus and control how people
are encountering it.
But one of the things that I will often do is leave the last few weeks sort of flexible
or open, especially in a class where my students are really investing in thinking not just

(53:37):
about the material that we're encountering, but also knowledge production in and of itself,
that there will often be like room for students to tell me what is missing, what they want
in those spaces, and then collectively build a syllabus together in the last few weeks

(54:01):
with material that either they ask for or that we sort of, that they go off and find.
And the first, I mean, it's interesting to think about now and how I even feel, you know,
where can I talk about this?
What does this look like?
The first time I taught the class, my students were like, we want to learn about Hamas.

(54:24):
What is Hamas?
Like how do we, like what do we, how do we understand Hamas?
Like what is this?
Are they terrorists?
Are they a political organization?
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Again, you know, all I knew was what I had read.
And I ended up assigning parts of the ethnography how to build a human bomb about the first
and second and Tafada and Hamas.

(54:46):
And it was really wild to just sort of, you know, now I think what would it be like to
try to do that?
I mean, you know, I've been reading through the Heritage Foundation's Project Esther report
and all of the ways that, you know, any kind of like talk of resistance or whatnot is,

(55:12):
you know, trying to be criminalized right now.
But the thing that I realized is that like my students wanted to go into the spaces in
which what I realized I was sort of creating this as our discursive space or like, you
know, the bounds of narrative, they wanted that.
They wanted to learn about resistance.

(55:33):
They wanted to like think about, you know, not just like history and culture, but they
wanted to think about, you know, political violence and they wanted to think about, you
know, violent resistance and they wanted to think about action.
And it pushed me to teach more about Gaza because I had found that so much of just because
of who I had met when I was in Palestine, so much of the material was coming out of

(55:55):
the West Bank and that really encouraged me the second time that I taught the class to
focus more on Gaza.
But I think, you know, one of the things that I love so much about teaching is how when
it is really working and students and myself are really showing up and being curious and
asking the right questions, they're bringing us to the edges of power and pushing against

(56:22):
that.
And what I found the first time I taught that class was that I was scared to talk about
political violence and I was scared to talk about, you know, violent resistance because
I didn't, you know, I had a good relationship with my students.
I had to trust that we were sort of all, but you know, I was at Columbia 2003 to 2005.

(56:44):
I know how things can be taken out of context.
And so I was really in that class, it was really a challenge.
And I haven't actually thought about this or talked about this until you asked this question.
So you know, I'm still a little unformed, unformed in my mind of how I tell this story.
But it really, it really challenged the limits of how I was controlling my classroom in which

(57:06):
if we're really like learning collectively, and we're really doing our jobs, our students,
curiosity and wonder and expectations are going to push us beyond the bounds in which
we think we have expertise or we think we have control or we think, you know, we have
whatever perceived power that we have in these spaces.

(57:29):
And so it was, it was a way of really challenging myself to follow my students' questions in
the most vulnerable and open way that I could.
And I'm pretty, it's pretty chilling to see the way over the past year, not that it hadn't

(57:50):
been like this before, but the past year in which that pedagogy of curiosity and vulnerability
and like actually trying to learn is being criminalized basically.
Yeah, and it's really interesting how, you know, you're offering so much of like this

(58:11):
very affective engagement with your students.
This idea of I always think this is no knock on anyone like Fanon, but it's like there
are things that were permitted to do that are sayable and thinkable in terms of political
violence and that curriculum is very small.
And yet students are always pushing at that boundary.

(58:35):
I mean, sitting with that difficulty is such an important pedagogical tool to have.
Sam, you had said you wanted to jump in.
Oh, yeah, so I wonder if, did those conversations with your students inspire you in particular,
you have your piece like reframing Hamas.
And I think it's really important because there are so many critiques of antisemitism

(59:00):
and what it is and isn't like what Zionism is.
And yet there, like when it comes to Palestinians, there's still this very, there's still an
inability to critique Hamas and look beyond like this black and white view of them as
a terrorist organization.
And I think your piece like does a really great job of contextualizing the movement

(59:26):
and how it was, it has been a movement for peace and how like the situation via like
occupation and Israeli violence has created this environment inconduasive to like nonviolent
responses.
And I was wondering if you could speak to that more.

(59:48):
Yeah, thanks.
I appreciate that question.
And I think, you know, again, there's a few ways that I can answer it.
And I will say like, as someone, you know, I joke with my partner that like my entire
personality right now is Palestine.
So you know, I can't really get away with, you know, this past year, I can't really get

(01:00:09):
away with what I've said in the past, which is Palestine is at the center of everything
I do in lots of different ways.
But like, I'm doing fieldwork in India, I'm doing fieldwork with therapeutic horsebacker,
I'm doing all of these things like the past, you know, year and a few months, 99% of the
time I'm thinking about Palestine or Lebanon now.
But I also, you know, want to say that I don't think I've said anything over the past year.

(01:00:37):
That's a particularly, you know, you know, original or innovative thing at all.
I think I'm saying the things that are coming out of my conversations with, you know, my
Palestinian friends and Palestinian writers that I read and Palestinians that I follow
on social media.
I mean, you know, 99.9% of what I've understood over this past year is because I'm listening

(01:01:03):
to Palestinians.
And I was both being accused of certain things even before I wrote that essay.
I was also reading Tarak Bakoni's Hamas Contained and thinking a lot about that.
But also, you know, listening to so many Palestinian writers and scholars and thinkers

(01:01:25):
and journalists who were like, you know, we have to talk about violent resistance, you
know, why we can't just be perfect victims who are so easily, you know, trafficked in
this sort of like, oh, poor you kind of way.
There's actually like, you know, this, you know, even like I've been, I mean, it's so

(01:01:48):
wild I've been reading Yaris Sinwar's novel, the, oh my God, what is it called?
I'm like reading it a PDF, The Thorn and the Carnation.
And I mean, it's a brilliant political treatise, right?
Like, like, this is, this is a, you know, especially in Gaza, a population that is incredibly

(01:02:09):
educated, you know, in multiple languages, writing, thinking, theorizing, etc., etc.
And if you're paying attention to thoughts and ideas and theories and methodologies that
are coming out of that space, it's a thousand different ways to think about resistance.
And yet I've seen none of that in the like, Americanized conversations that I was having.

(01:02:33):
And I just happen to be the kind of person who like, likes to like push at those spaces.
I get myself in trouble.
And I'm trying to be clear-eyed about what that means.
But I think we need to be pushing at those spaces.
And so all of that was to say, I wrote that essay because I was just so tired of seeing

(01:02:55):
the way that, you know, Hamas is, is, is different.
Hamas is not Gaza.
Hamas is not Palestine.
Like, mostly it's, you know, women and children.
We should not just be talking about women and children.
We should also, we should be talking about everyone, right?
You know, I think that in the U.S. and in Israel, we've seen time and time again that
like, there is no form of Palestinian resistance that is acceptable, whether it be peaceful

(01:03:20):
or violent.
And we can marginalize peaceful resistance or like shoot people in the knees during the
great march of return, criminalize BDS, and then we can frame all other kinds of political
violence, legitimate political violence as terrorism.
And then nobody can talk about it.
Everybody is sort of afraid.
And I really believe that, you know, we're operating under fascism and have been for,

(01:03:45):
I mean, probably since the inception of this country.
It's not a new phenomenon.
But when fascism is a set of tools that involves replacing information with power, then our
job in resistance is pushing against those spaces in which we've already been told we
cannot speak.
And I think there is something too about how it's not to sanitize it, but to say that

(01:04:08):
a classroom is a space apart, right?
As you, I guess we should get into now, unfortunately, know all too well, a classroom is not a container.
And in many ways, that's good, right?
We should spill out into the world and be of and in the world through our teaching.
But it's where we can push it those boundaries in a way that, you know what, maybe, maybe

(01:04:32):
this is uncomfortable.
We want to let it sit in the classroom and then go away from this.
Maybe we want to mess around and say the wrong thing, but have that be a place where we can
mess up and we can say our ideas and engage in dialogue in ways that isn't fully formed,
right?
That's the whole point of building schools is to have that space apart from the real

(01:04:57):
world.
It is part of that extra time.
But yeah, I mean, you might be exhausted from talking about it, but, and I apologize
to lean into there, probably everyone you encounter is like, how are you?
But do you want to talk about getting fired?

(01:05:19):
I think there's a real pedagogical address there.
I'm a non-tenured Jewish professor.
I think I don't want to center myself in any way.
And I think we should also get into the ways that you've been so fantastic about pivoting
from centering yourself to addressing that this is about Palestine and Palestinians.

(01:05:40):
But I did feel like your firing is addressed to any of us who might push for academic freedom
and want to talk about Palestinian solidarity and Palestinian liberation.
So maybe just how you see kind of what you were being taught, how you maybe just even

(01:06:01):
the experience of it.
I don't know.
I mean, anything that you want to take up and do you want to just scream into the ether
at Mulenberg and the entire system?
Well, okay, so I saw many things that I could say.
So at the very beginning, you asked me about my early education and I sort of like casually

(01:06:25):
mentioned a teacher named Coleman McCarthy who taught this class called Peace Studies.
And I'll, I'll just tell that story now because I think it's really important to sort of think
about where we are now.
So I, the same semester that I was taking this Middle East history class, I was in Coleman's

(01:06:46):
Peace Studies class and it was really a laboratory for me.
You know, I've been looking for, I need to go back to my parents house and see if I have
any materials from there.
But I think that like everything radical that I read in high school was really given to
me by either Mr. Bedrin or Coleman and Coleman was the first time that I read Gandhi.

(01:07:09):
It was the first time I read the radical thing I was learning about.
But I learned about the American Indian movement during, like it was just, it was a really
good grounding and it was probably like Howard Zinn's like alternate history.
What is that book called?
I think that, you know, yeah, people's history of the United States.

(01:07:30):
There's a lot of like material from that and rethinking American history through a, what
he called Peace Studies, but really felt like a revolutionary framework.
And he also was the first person who took me to protests.
And most importantly, he took me to protest at Lockheed Martin because he wanted me to
understand commodity chains and like where we need to think about resistance to, you

(01:07:57):
know, the American military war machine if we're, you know, it's not just about like
holding science in the street.
It's also understanding the sort of like production of it all.
It was really, really important to me.
And I was trying to try out things during that semester.
And one of them was not going to an assembly about like prom behavior during his class

(01:08:20):
because I wasn't going to go to prom.
And so it wasn't going to go to this assembly.
And I, all this, you know, students in my class went to this assembly as we were called
to do.
And I was like, I'm going to stay here and like learn about nonviolence with Coleman.
And the vice principal came to class after they figured out that there were students
missing, told me that I needed to go to this assembly.

(01:08:41):
And I was like sitting there waiting and looking to Coleman.
And I wanted him to back me up.
And he was like, he's like, you need to decide what you want to do.
You're never going to be rewarded for resistance.
And you need to figure out if this is something that you are willing to, you know, see through.
I was being threatened with suspension.

(01:09:02):
And he was like, you know, there's always a cost.
And you like when, when you're doing organizing and activism, you need to figure out what
you have and what you can afford to lose.
Is this something that you're willing to lose out on?
And I decided that it wasn't.
And I went to the assembly.
And I've been, you know, I've been thinking about that in terms of like the afterlife

(01:09:23):
of our education.
I think about that all the time, that moment in which I felt like he gave me the most important
tools I needed to figure out how I wanted to show up in the world.
And for years, both at Mielenberg and at Mills, mostly at Mielenberg, my students would come
to me and they would be like, I want to protest this thing or I want to push back against
this thing.
The administration is doing this, et cetera, et cetera.

(01:09:43):
And I'm getting to the question, I promise.
And I would always tell them, you know, like, I can't tell you what to do.
But what I can tell you is that you have to figure out what you have to lose and whether
or not this is what you want to lose those things on.
And sometimes they would say, you know, I need this letter of recommendation from the

(01:10:04):
provost in order to get this scholarship or I need this in order to get that.
If, you know, I think, I think one of the things that we've seen with the encampments
with, you know, faculty putting their staff, putting their neck out on the line for students
and for Palestine and whatnot, is that sometimes people are very clear about what they have
and what they can afford to lose.

(01:10:25):
And that's where we win.
Being very clear eyed about what we have, what we could afford to lose and what the costs
are.
And I think when people are losing more than they can afford to lose, that's where I think,
like, we need a bigger collective strategy to see how people can sort of come to the
movement and be really, you know, like, I could lose, I didn't want to lose my job.
I didn't think I was going to lose my job.

(01:10:45):
I mean, this was a huge shock to me.
But I also was like, I am willing, you know, like, I was given all of these opportunities
to sort of apologize and put my head down and be quiet.
I don't know if that would have, you know, saved me, but I think I had to be very clear
about like, what is the worst case scenario here?
And can I afford that loss?

(01:11:08):
And I think when it comes to genocide, I think the thing that I've been very clear about
over the past year is that there is a lot that I'm willing to lose because the US is
funding Israel's genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and now also in the occupied West

(01:11:29):
Bank as they always have been and also ethnic cleansing in Lebanon.
For me, I have not been asked to sacrifice anything.
I don't even see it as a sacrifice.
Like, I've not given up anything that feels important enough to like even compare to genocide.
But I guess all of this is to say, I knew from a very long, you know, since like teaching

(01:11:55):
the Skas on Palestine, bringing Palestinian scholars that Halal International had their
eye on me, they did not want me around and that they were going to take an opportunity
if it emerged to try to get rid of me.
And, you know, in partnership with Zionist donors who, you know, because of the way our
education system works have a lot of power over the how our, you know, colleges and universities

(01:12:20):
can operate.
The administration was sort of, I think, put in a position because of the pressure from
students and alumni associated with Halal and donors who identified as Zionist and wanted
to shut me up.
I think the administration was under a lot of pressure to push through a case that could

(01:12:44):
be grounds for dismissal.
So in the fall, it was first concern of Ramai teaching because a student brought a complaint
against me and that was investigated and found to be not credible.
Then it was with my publications.
So I, in particular, I mean, you know, the Hamas essay didn't, you know, burn or me any
favors, but the real trigger was this essay I published called Never Again Means Never

(01:13:08):
Again for anyone that I published after going to the first big JVP organized rally in Washington,
DC in October.
And I was accused of, you know, being a Holocaust denier because I was calling more than the
Holocaust a genocide.
I was accused of making Jewish students feel unsafe because I was calling what Israel was
doing a genocide.
So they tried with publications, academic freedom got in the way.

(01:13:31):
And so in January, the case that was eventually brought against me was by a student who was
in Halal leadership who I've never met.
No, I mean, I know who the student is because they had been surveilling my social media for
months.
But the student brought a complaint against me based on an Instagram slide that I reposted

(01:13:56):
written by the Palestinian poet Rami Knazzi that said, don't normalize Zionism.
And the student claimed that that post violated the equal opportunity non-discrimination policy
because the student identified as a Zionist and the student believed that Zionism is being
Israeli and Judaism were all the same.

(01:14:18):
And so I was denying the student a right to an education.
When I found out that this was actually the case that they brought against me.
And now, you know, I feel a little naive.
I was like relieved.
I was like, oh, this is ridiculous.
This is like, this isn't going to go anywhere.
And in fact, it led to a three month investigation.

(01:14:40):
It led to this investigation through the Title IX office that found me guilty of four counts
of discrimination, online discrimination, harassment, online harassment led to my termination.
And now we're in an appeals process with the actual faculty committee.
Like everything happens sort of in the secrecy of the Title IX black box.
And now it's actually like with the faculty handbook procedures that we'll see what's

(01:15:03):
going to happen.
But I think it was really an education for me in that, you know, because we've seen the
way in which, you know, colleges and universities have had their federal funding, you know,
eroded over the years, they were relying on tuition and donors and whatnot, that this

(01:15:28):
investment in a fantasy of academic freedom that we used to be able to claim because at
private colleges, you don't actually have academic freedom, but we sort of claim it as, you know,
our normative culture that actually when it comes down to money, colleges and universities
are willing to sacrifice the integrity of the institution in order to, you know, shore

(01:15:53):
up finances.
And the thing that I've had to ask myself over the past year is, you know, what do I
have to lose?
And can I afford to lose that?
You know, hearing Coleman's voice in my head, and I can't imagine not being willing to lose

(01:16:15):
my job because there's a genocide happening in Gaza that we are funding and supporting.
And it is the worst thing that I have ever seen or experienced, and I'm not even experiencing
in my entire life, and in some ways my entire life has been like prepping me to be the kind

(01:16:37):
of person that I hope a lot of us feel that we are, which is like genocide, which, you
know, like, I don't think that there's anything special or unique about a Jewish education
that makes you want to say genocide is bad, but also, you know, if I have received anything
from my like, traumatizing Holocaust education, it was the reason that that was happening

(01:16:59):
is because people, Germans didn't do anything, they didn't say anything, you know, if only,
if only, you know, if we were alive, then we would have done X, Y, and Z, and it's like,
well, what are you willing to do now to be part of the resistance?
And honestly, getting fired was not like my plan, but I don't want my job that much that

(01:17:24):
I want, that I that I want an institution to be able to tell me to not talk and teach
and write about genocide while it's happening and while it's being funded by my tax dollars.
So this teacher just sounds so wonderful.
And again, I just want to reinforce the way that this opens up the idea that there are
all these wonderful critical things happening in public schools all the time.

(01:17:48):
I tell my students constantly that, you know, we feel really good about this and I'm like,
oh, no, this is how it should be done of like, we wake up and we do capitalism and empire
every day here in the US and it happens unequally, but the choice that you're going to have to
make is what intolerance, what am I not willing to tolerate?

(01:18:11):
But that's such an abstract thing.
And you're showing how this teacher offered for you a direct example of how that could
happen and it and it allowed for you to be ready for for this moment, which is, you know,
enraging and and also really powerful to to see as you confront it.

(01:18:38):
And, you know, I think of another person who's kind of out of bounds who I've been thinking
about writing a little about Aaron Bushnell, who said, you know, we we ask all the time,
what would we do in history?
And you're answering that every single day.
You're answering it right now.
And I just if I could like cut in there, I think, you know, one of the things that I

(01:19:02):
think about a lot is that, you know, I I'm a little, you know, like, I'm not gonna lie,
like I'm 45, I need my health insurance.
I, you know, don't like I can't live the way that I did in my 20s, you know, not having
an income is is really scary.
But it's, you know, I have an incredible support system.
I, you know, have, you know, for whatever it's worth right now, citizenship, I'm not

(01:19:28):
going to be deported.
I think, you know, the question that all of us who are really scared about what's been
happening in the past year and what's going to happen now with Trump administration and,
you know, the the chaos and further degradation of what we used to pretend was a democracy.
I think we all have to start accounting for what do we have and what can we afford to

(01:19:51):
lose?
Because if we are really going to resist what is coming down the path, we all have to be
willing to sacrifice and lose something.
And I think that that looks different from everyone.
And I, you know, I think that if we're going to have any kind of collective movement that,
you know, can be built and sustain in the long run, we all have to be really clear

(01:20:14):
at and honest about what we have, what we can afford to lose, what's worth putting on
the line, what would actually be too devastating to even imagine.
I mean, I think that there needs to be a lot of honesty over that.
Probably the most impactful book in my thinking as an educator is this.
It's called Unsettled Belonging by Thea Abu El-Hajj.

(01:20:39):
And you may know her sister who's also a Colombian.
She's thinking about what goes into your classroom.
We need professors who are teaching not only about these topics, but in these ways and are
making wonder and situatedness and deep methodological engagement so crucial.

(01:21:02):
Maybe you can't even talk about this, but I'm wondering if you even want to or if you're
more of the mindset of, you know, we need to just burn it all down.
Higher education has no place in this fight.
Yeah.
I mean, as for the classroom, I will say I'm happy to share my syllabus.
I have a reading list that I've been circulating with my cultural anthropology new article.

(01:21:27):
I think it's really important to be sharing actual lists and like these are the books,
etc., etc.
But it's been very important to me in a lot of my different classes, especially classes
that I think are challenging.
You know, people talk about decolonizing shit all the time.

(01:21:50):
Can I say first whether it be the institution or discipline or whatever.
And I'm like, you can't decolonize a colonial institution and decolonization is not a metaphor,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But I do think one of the things that we can do is decanonize our syllabi and decanonize
the way in which we think about knowledge and instead think about the kinds of lineages

(01:22:12):
that we want to be part of and how we rebuild them.
And so when I put together pretty much any of my syllabi, but like particularly a class
like my Palestine class where I'm trying to actually not just dismantle what's already
been established as like how you can talk about the region but build something new.

(01:22:33):
I think it also is about, you know, I call my class the anthropology of Palestine because
I need to get approved as a class, but it's not, it's anthropology methodologically, but
we read poetry, we read novels, we watch a lot of films, both like narrative films,
documentaries.
We think about all of the different mediums in which we can access information and story.

(01:22:57):
And I think that, you know, visuals are really important, like we read a graphic novel called
Badawi.
There's just, I think, so many different ways to think about like how stories are being
told and how they circulate and what they do and what they present themselves to us
as.
And, you know, in terms of what it means to think about teaching in the future, I think,

(01:23:24):
you know, for, and maybe this resonates, I think for a really long time there was work
that I wanted to do and a really simple, clear way to do that work was to teach in an institution
where I was like getting a paycheck and whatnot.
And I, you know, I sort of say simple flippantly because getting a tenure-track job is like

(01:23:44):
winning the lottery.
It's not a meritocracy, there are no jobs and like the best people usually don't get
the job because like if you can be approved by like five people who hate each other, who
are stuck in a room arguing over the future of a discipline, like, you know, we got our
jobs, that's great.
But like also that's not necessarily indicative to the like the best part, you know, I don't
believe in meritocracies or these hierarchies, but it's very hard to get an academic job

(01:24:11):
and it's apparently very hard to keep one.
And so, you know, I have been asking myself what I want to be back in the classroom.
And I think the thing I will say is that I don't know, but I want the choice.
I want, you know, that to be my decision.
But I also think, you know, for those of us who are really invested in being teachers,

(01:24:32):
whatever that means, there's so many places to be teaching and learning outside of the
classroom.
And I think, you know, again, I think it was Eli Mayerhoff's interview, but you know,
I know you've talked about this on the podcast before where, you know, the student encampments
were the most like radical and hopeful spaces of education.

(01:24:55):
And of course, they're incredibly dangerous to the institution.
The institution is going to like send militarized police to go, you know, break them up.
Because if we're actually thinking about teaching and learning as being something radical,
it's of course going to be a threat to the institution.
So given everything that's happening in higher ed right now, I don't, I'm an optimist, but

(01:25:17):
I don't feel very hopeful about the immediate future of higher ed.
I think long term, if we work really hard, we might be able to like move it towards,
you know, free education, a different kind of like engagement with what these institutions
are really grappling with, you know, their history as, you know, land grab sites of extraction

(01:25:37):
and hierarchy and how we can like rethink them in different ways.
I think there's so much work.
And you know, I think Palestine is showing us that, right?
Like Palestine is showing us how if you look at the, you know, colonial foundation of,
you know, a settler colony, all you're going to find is rot and inequity and violence.

(01:25:58):
And we can't reform these spaces in these institutions.
We actually have to, you know, collapse them and bring something, build something new.
And I think that, you know, thinking really critically about what we want spaces of teaching
and learning to do and trying to push our classrooms in that direction for as long as

(01:26:20):
we can until we actually have to grapple with the fact that these structures are not spaces
of liberation.
They're like actually quite the contrary.
And those of us who are really invested in learning and study, you know, we have to imagine
and otherwise and it doesn't look like a colonial institution.

(01:26:41):
Yeah.
So Palestine will be free.
And then we will burn into the fucking ground, build an undercommons that is full of care
and rest and collective study and health insurance.
And with that, I hope that you continue to teach and that that looks many different ways.

(01:27:09):
And that many people encounter your teaching and that we keep studying towards a free Palestine
in solidarity.
And we'll just say thank you so much for being a guest.
Thank you for your time.
And Sam, is there anything else to wrap it up?
What you have been doing is really valuable for the field of education and study.

(01:27:35):
Thank you.
I really appreciate that.
And I am so grateful for this space.
And, you know, the last thing that I will say if it's okay is that, no, I think there's
a real urgency to be as loud as we can and as disruptive as we can because there is a
genocide happening.
And, you know, despite the official numbers, there's anywhere from like 400,000 to a million
Palestinians who have been murdered by Israel's genocidal assault, if you think about like

(01:27:59):
indirect deaths and folks who are starving to death and trapped under the rubble, it's
an immediate emergency and crisis.
And we should be as loud and as forceful as we possibly can.
And we need to think of new strategies and tactics, especially under a Trump administration.
But I think, you know, we're also talking about a decolonial movement and Palestinians

(01:28:19):
have been working and studying and imagining and planning towards a decolonization movement
for a very long time.
And I think we also need to learn from them and be patient with the sort of like individually
framed sort of neoliberal form of being in this country where like I want it immediately

(01:28:41):
or else I should just like put my head down and buy what I can afford.
And I think instead think that, you know, Palestine is teaching us what a real decolonization
movement looks like.
And we need to learn from that, not just because a free Palestine will show the rot of every
settler colony from the West Australia, etc., etc.
But also because we need to be patient and realize that, you know, we might not see the

(01:29:04):
benefit of a like truly like radical space of learning in a decolonized, you know, Turtle
Island, but we have to just keep working towards it in a collective imaginative kind of way,
regardless of the fact that like our attempts will be crushed at all.

(01:29:25):
All ends and we can't like lose hope or be apathetic.
This is again my like optimism coming back.
But yeah, a free Palestine will free us all.
I believe that.
Thank you so much for listening.

(01:29:53):
Today's episode was produced by Yardein Amran and Samantha Haley.
More is encouraging folks to donate to workshops for Gaza, the Samir Project, and Gaza Funds.
We'll share links for those projects and other ways to support them on our social media.
You can find us on Instagram at another ed as possible.
We hope that our podcast contributes to the urgent yet slow work of unmaking Zionism.

(01:30:17):
You can support us by continuing to listen, by liking us, following us, rating us, and
sharing the podcast on social media.
We'll be back soon with a new episode of Another Education As Possible.