Reimagining Palestine

Seth Anziska (Moderator)

Seth Anziska is the Mohamed S. Farsi-Lindenbaum Professor of Jewish-Muslim Relations at University College London, where he is the founding director of the Middle East Research Centre. His research and teaching focuses on modern Middle Eastern history, Palestine and Israel, archival practices and visual culture, and contemporary Arab and Jewish politics. He is the author of Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo (Princeton University Press: 2018; Arabic edition, Institute for Palestine Studies, 2022), which was awarded the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies Book Prize. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, +972 Magazine, and the 55th Venice Biennale. He is currently a fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa, where he is working on an international history of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and its afterlives, with research supported by the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust. He has also held fellowships at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, New York University, and the American University of Beirut, and was a visiting professor at Dartmouth College.

Leila Farsakh

Leila Farsakh is an Associate Professor and Department Chair at University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is the author of Palestinian Labor Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation, (London: Routledge, second edition, 2012) and has published on questions related to the political economy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, alternative to partition, and international migration in a wide range of academic journals, including the Middle East Journal, the European Journal of Development Research, Ethnopolitics, the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Journal of Palestine Studies and Le Monde Diplomatique. She has also worked with a number of international organizations, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris and since 2008 has been a senior research fellow at the Center for Development Studies at Birzeit University, in the West Bank. In 2001 she won the Peace and Justice Award from the Cambridge Peace Commission, in Cambridge-Massachusetts.

Yara Hawari

Yara Hawari is the co-director of Al-Shabaka- the Palestinian Policy Network. She previously served as the Palestine policy fellow and senior analyst. She taught various undergraduate courses at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at Exeter. In addition to her academic work, her political analysis features in many international media outlets including The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and Al Jazeera English. Dr. Hawari published her first novel, The Stone House, in 2021 and is the host of the podcast series Rethinking Palestine. 

Sherene Seikaly

Sherene Seikaly is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her book Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores economy, territory, the home, and the body. Her forthcoming book, From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine tells a global history of capital, slavery, and dispossession. She is the Editor of Journal of Palestine Studies, Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UCSB, co-editor of the Stanford Studies Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures Series, and co-editor of Jadaliyya. 

Rebecca Vilkomerson

Rebecca Vilkomerson is the Co-Director of Funding Freedom, which organizes support for Palestinian liberation within philanthropy.  She is the co-author, with Rabbi Alissa Wise, of the 2024  book Solidarity is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing published by Haymarket Books. She authored the report Funding Freedom: Philanthropy and Palestinian Freedom Movement, published by Solidaire Network in 2022. From 2009-2019 she was the Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace. She serves on the boards of Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ) and her synagogue in Brooklyn, NY.