Egypt: A People Divided
On the night of July 3, exactly 48 hours after General Abdul Fatah Sisi of the Special Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) gave President Morsi an ultimatum—either he listen to the demands of the...
Category: Middle East
Egypt: Is History Repeating?
Judging from Twitter, Egypt is in complete chaos. Online, protesters in the square tweeted pictures of a Tahrir Square that resembled the first, triumphant images of the Arab Spring and shared...
Occupy Gezi: Inside Turkey’s Phony Democracy
On Sunday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan climbed onto a bus in Ankara, Turkey in front of a crowd of raging protesters and warned that his patience with the protests—that are now in...
The Civil Disobedience of the Women of the Wall
Among the world's Jews, a gender war looms at Judaism’s holiest site. The Women of the Wall are a group of Jewish women who have been holding monthly services at the Kotel, the Western Wall, in...
What does a “Free Palestine” Really Mean?
“Free, Free Palestine!” I used to lead the chants at protests as a teenager, but I was never entirely sure of what they meant. Of course, I knew my history. I knew that in 1948 the state of...
Review: The Year of Dreaming Dangerously
Slavoj Zizek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, Verso, 2012. The work of Slavoj Zizek is by now a genre of critical theory in itself, complete with its own distinctive characteristics. These include:...
Watching Boston as an Arab-American in Palestine
When I heard that two bombs had exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, my heart sank. Please, please don’t be an Arab-American. Please, please don’t be one of us. I know this isn’t...
Recovering From an Obama Hangover in Palestine
What just happened? First, President Barack Obama landed in Tel Aviv—he stepped onto the tarmac, said “Shalom” and the crowd went wild. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers saluted him and...
A Non-Zionist Jewishness? Judith Butler’s Parting Ways
Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. Columbia UP, 2013 Having made her name in the early 90s with Gender Trouble, a densely-written look at the ways in which gender is...
Milestones: Who Are Americans a Decade Into the Iraq War?
March 20, 2003: The date on which former President George W. Bush first deployed troops to Iraq. Exactly 10 years, $1.7 trillion U.S. and a minimum of 190,000 corpses ago today. Ten years ago today,...