What can we learn from our experiences of the past 15 months? What lessons can we draw from the history, culture, and politics of the Middle East to inform our much needed solidarity movement?

This series of teach-ins, featuring academics, activists, writers, and artists, attempts to ground our understanding of this moment in vital historical and cultural context, while inviting participants to explore connections between our struggles here in Philadelphia with the struggles of people in the region.

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Join us Sunday, February 16, 2-4pm for a talk with Dr. Nitzan Lebovic and Dr. Nada Matta on HIstories of Zionism, Nakb, and Refugees. Dr. Lebovic will propose an alternative to the canonical history of Zionism, one that demonstrates how seemingly rival strands of Zionism (Revisionist, Political, Cultural) united around a shared notion of Jewish Revival (T’hia) and denying a Palestinian right of return. Dr. Matta will expound on the Zionist movement’s unified stand, taken before 1948, regarding the expulsion of the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants. She will detail the difficult conditions of Palestinian refugees in the Arab world and connect the expulsion of Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba and the genocide in Gaza, highlighting how US policy has helped shape this trajectory by allowing and supporting Jewish supremacy in Israel.

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Dr. Nada Matta is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Global Studies and Sociology at Drexel University. She is also the director of the Middle East and North Africa Minor. Her work investigates questions of structural inequality and social change in the Middle East, with particular focus on gender and labor movements. She is currently working on a book manuscript tilted ‘Class Forces in the Egyptian Uprising of 2011.’ She also published articles in the European Journal of Sociology, Critical Historical Studies, Politics and Society, and ILR Review.

Dr. Nitzan Lebovic is a professor of history and the Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values at Lehigh University. Nitzan is the author of The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (2013), Zionism and Melancholy: The short Life of Israel Zarchi (2019), and Homo Temporalis: Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan about Time (2025). Nitzan edited collections of essays and special issues dedicated to concepts such as political theology, nihilism, and biopolitics. His new project is titled “The history of complicity, 1945- Present.” He is one of the founders of Academia4Equality in Israel-Palestine.

Histories of Zionism, Nakba, & Refugees

Histories of Zionism, Nakba, & Refugees

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