There is a dire need for an interdisciplinary examination of the human cost of occupation through the lens of daily Palestinian experience in the West Bank. This episode explores the critically acclaimed work of Nathan Thrall, whose immersive narrative provides rare insight into the lived reality of Palestinians navigating Israeli systems of control that define life under occupation. There are prefixed structural inequalities embedded in the segregated apartheid landscape of Jerusalem and the West Bank that Palestinians including those within the diaspora must face daily—displacement from ancestral lands, violence from settlers, and systematic discrimination. Thrall's Pulitzer Prize-winning book explores the personal dimensions of a conflict often discussed in abstract geopolitical terms.

Through intimate portrayals of individual Palestinians confronting institutional barriers and daily dignitary harms, his work humanizes the ancestral consequences of policies that separate communities, restrict movement, and create parallel legal systems based on ethnicity and religion. 

In his conversation with Professor Sahar Aziz, Nathan Thrall shares powerful excerpts from his work that capture the apartheid conditions experienced by West Bank Palestinians who live under military occupation while neighboring Israeli settlements enjoy full rights and protection. His narrative approach moves beyond headlines and statistics to reveal the emotional and psychological toll of occupation on individuals and families caught in systems designed to maintain separation and inequality.

Join Sahar Aziz and Nathan Thrall in a conversation that offers listeners a deeper understanding of one of the world's most contested regions through the transformative lens of personal narrative and lived experience.

Recommended Reading:

Nathan Thrall,A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy(2023)

Resources on Palestine and Palestinians -RutgersCenter for Security, Race and Rights
resources/palestinefacts/

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Apartheid #ICC #HumanRights

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A central paradox has plagued and continues to plague the American right to vote: the American republic has always conditioned participation in the democratic process on an antidemocratic ideology of worthiness needed to exercise the rights of citizenship. This reality has shaped debates around the right to vote in the past and in the present and has made it more difficult for the law to embrace the rhetoric of a universal right to vote—that is, a right for all citizens to participate freely and fairly. 

This is the defining dilemma of voting rights in American history. Indeed, the histories surrounding voting rights admit to the progress that was required to gain a more expansive right to vote for all American citizens, yet at the same time recognize that these rights are inherently and constantly contested. The continued contest around voting rights is ultimately attributable to this paradox.

An expert on voting rights law, Professor Atiba Ellis provides the historical, legal and political backdrop against which voting rights of racial minorities continue to be curtailed through manipulation of state laws.  Professor Ellis explains how the Voting Rights Act of 1965 shifted from a powerful tool for affirmatively ending racial discrimination especially against African American voters to an ineffective safeguard against rising disenfranchisement of racial minorities.

Listen to the conversation between Professor Sahar Aziz and Professor Atiba Ellis about a topic that will shape the hotly contested November 2026 mid-term elections.

Recommended Readings

Atiba R. Ellis, The Voting Rights Paradox: Ideology and Incompleteness of American Democratic Practice, 55 Georgia L. Rev. 1553 (2021)

Atiba R. Ellis, Voter Fraud as an Epistemic Crisis for the Right to Vote, 71 Mercer L. Rev. 757 (2020).

Atiba R. Ellis, Tiered Personhood and the Excluded Voter, 90 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 463 (2015).

Sahar F. Aziz, The Blinding Color of Race: Elections and Democracy in the Post-Shelby County Era, 17 Berkeley J. Afr.-Am. L. & Pol'y 182 (2015).

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In today’s episode, guest host Nermin Allam, director of Women’s and Gender Studies and associate professor of political science at Rutgers University – Newark, speaks with Rusha Latif, author of Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution, to reflect on remembering and commemorating the January 25th uprising.

The January 25th uprising, which led to the ousting of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, remains one of the most consequential moments in Egypt’s modern political history. The uprising restructured political imagination, reordered lives, and briefly redefined what felt possible.

Every year, January 25th asks something of us. It asks us to remember. It asks us to reckon. And it asks us to return carefully and critically to a moment that continues to unsettle our present. This episode is part of that reckoning. As we mark the anniversary of the uprising, we are joined by Rusha Latif to revisit the experiences of the young people who animated that moment and who carried its weight forward long after the chants faded and the public space closed.

The conversation invites us to resist simplification and to honor the complexity of a revolutionary moment whose political afterlives still shape how we understand protest, possibility, and loss. It invites listeners to consider what it means to commemorate a revolution in a time when its promises remain unfinished.

Biography

Rusha Latif is an Egyptian-American researcher and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work focuses on social movements and revolutions in the Middle East, with an emphasis on leadership, organization, and collective action across lines of class, gender, religion, and ideology. Her research has been featured on NPR, Al Jazeera, and Jadaliyya. Her book, Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution is published by the AUC Press, in 2022).

Bio Link: https://rushalatif.com/

Publication: https://rushalatif.com/tahrirs-youth/

Nermin Allam is the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University-Newark. She is a nonresident fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Allam’s research focuses on gender politics and social movements in the Middle East and North Africa. Allam’s work has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Mobilization, Politics & Gender, PS: Political Science & Politics, Democratization among other journals.

Link:

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The true test of a democracy is the extent to which civil rights in law are enforced in practice for the most vulnerable groups in society. As members of Congress demanded mass arrest and expulsion of college students exercising their free speech right to dissent against U.S. foreign policy in Gaza and the West Bank, the racial fault lines in American democracy were yet again laid bare.

Similarly, university presidents are buckling to external political pressure to violate academic freedom of Muslim and Arab faculty targeted by external anti-Muslim and pro-Israeli groups and politicians. In this episode, Distinguished Law Professor Sahar Aziz examines how Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism intersect to produce systematic assaults on the civil rights of racialized communities.

These concerted efforts to quash the nonviolent Palestine Solidarity Movement set dangerous rights-infringing precedents that are now being weaponized against immigrant rights advocates and supporters of diversity, equity and inclusion.  The same conservative groups and politicians who complain about the erosion of free speech in America are now spearheading the policing of viewpoints and speech expressed by progressive students and faculty on college campuses.

Listen to Professor Aziz as she explains the origins and harmful consequences of the Palestine Taboo on all American’s free speech and political freedoms, which is the basis of her forthcoming book on the topic.

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Genocide #PalestineTaboo #FreeSpeech #AcademicFreedom

Suggested Readings

Sahar Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom (2022)

Mitchell Plitnick and Sahar Aziz, Presumptively Antisemitic: Islamophobic Tropes in the Palestine Israel Discourse (2023)

Sahar Aziz, Racing Religion in the Palestine Israel Discourse, AJIL Unbound , Volume 118 , 2024 , pp. 118 – 123.

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In Part II of this two-part series, guest host Esaa Mohammad Sabti Samarah, PhD, LMSW reunites with Dr. Siham Elkassem, Dr. Bryn King, Dr. Nuha Dwaikat-Shaer, and doctoral candidate Amilah Baksh to move beyond naming harm and toward a deeper examination of responsibility. This episode turns a critical lens on how the social work profession responds, or fails to respond, to anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racisms, with particular attention to the ways calls for “neutrality” shape research, teaching, and professional practice.

The conversation interrogates neutrality as it appears in social work academia, especially in relation to empiricism and claims of objectivity. The panel introduces and critically examines the concept of “weepy universalism,” a term they coin for social workers in their forthcoming work to describe how generalized expressions of sympathy can obscure power, flatten difference, and ultimately reproduce harm rather than challenge it.

The episode also brings these debates down from theory to practice, exploring what they mean for social workers on the ground, particularly those working with youth and communities most directly impacted by these forms of racism. The series closes with a collective call to action, challenging the profession to move beyond symbolic gestures and toward principled, sustained solidarity with Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, as part of broader struggles for justice and liberation.

This episode invites listeners to reckon with complicity, resist comfort, and reimagine what ethical practice demands in moments of profound injustice.

#BeyondNeutrality #EthicalSocialWork #SolidarityNotSilence #WeepyUniversalism #YouthJustice #DecolonizeSocialWork #JusticeInAction

Links to Published Works

Dwaikat-Shaer, N., Baksh, A., Elkassem, S., & King, B. (2025). Phenomenologies of Silence: On the Palestine Exception and the Complicity of Social Work Academe. Abolitionist Perspectives in Social Work, 3(2).

Siham Elkassem - Google Scholar

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In this first episode of a two-part series, guest host Esaa Mohammad Sabti Samarah, PhD, LMSW leads a powerful conversation examining how anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racisms function as distinct yet interconnected systems of harm. Together with scholars and practitioners Dr. Siham Elkassem, Dr. Bryn King, Dr. Nuha Dwaikat-Shaer, and Doctoral Candidate Amilah Baksh, the discussion examines how these forms of racism operate across structural, institutional, and interpersonal levels, and how they are sustained through histories of colonialism, racialization, and political violence.

The episode critically interrogates the social work profession’s response to these realities, confronting the gap between professed values and practiced silence. The panel names this silence as more than inaction: it is complicity reinforced by selective empathy, professional caution, and institutional pressures that limit meaningful engagement with Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim suffering.

Listeners are invited to reflect on how racism is produced and maintained within professional spaces, and how social work education and practice can either reproduce harm or become a site of resistance and transformation. Part I lays the foundation by naming the problem clearly and setting the stage for a deeper examination in Part II, Beyond Neutrality: Confronting Silence, Resistance, and a Call to Action. The second episode deepens the conversation by examining neutrality, dissent, and professional responsibility, with particular attention to the impact on youth and affected communities.

This episode is essential listening for anyone committed to racial justice, human rights, and accountability within social work and allied professions.

#AntiRacism #PalestinianRights #AntiMuslimRacism #AntiPalistinianRacism #AntiArabRacism #ArabAndMuslimVoices #SocialWorkJustice #ColonialismAndResistance

Links to Published Works

Elkassem, S. (2024). Beyond Hate: Confronting Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Racism in Social Work. Intersectionalities, 12(1), 1-29.

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There has been an alarming surge of anti-Muslim sentiment across the European continent. As Islamophobia continues to gain momentum throughout Europe—home to tens of millions of Muslim citizens—Professor Hafez offers listeners a comprehensive analysis of this troubling phenomenon. His work examines the multifaceted causes of this rise in Muslim prejudice, from historical legacies and media representations to contemporary political movements. 

Join us as Professor Hafez delves deeper into the divisive effects of Islamophobia on both Muslim and non-Muslim communities across Europe. He explores how this prejudice manifests in various spheres—from institutional discrimination and policy decisions to everyday interactions and personal experiences. The discussion highlights the broader implications for European society, questioning how these attitudes challenge fundamental values of pluralism, human rights, and social cohesion. Join host Sahar Aziz and Professor Hafez as they offer listeners insight into one of the most pressing social issues facing contemporary Europe, examining both its immediate impacts and long-term consequences for a continent grappling with questions of identity, belonging, and religious freedom in an increasingly diverse society.

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Genocide #ICC #HumanRights

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In this episode, we welcome Professor Jonathan Hafetz for an insightful discussion on the complex legal challenges involved in prosecuting individuals accused of mass crimes. Our conversation traces the development of international justice mechanisms from the foundational Nuremberg trials through to contemporary approaches in the age of global terrorism.

Professor Hafetz examines how nations have attempted to hold perpetrators accountable while maintaining commitment to fair trial principles - a tension that continues to define international criminal law. The discussion explores the significant impact of the U.S. War on Terrorism on legal frameworks and its disproportionate effects on Arab and Muslim communities.

Throughout the episode, we consider how these legal precedents influence current justice systems and what lessons can be drawn from past successes and failures. This thoughtful analysis offers listeners a clearer understanding of the delicate balance between pursuing accountability for grave crimes and preserving fundamental rights protections, even for those accused of the most serious offenses.

This episode provides valuable context for anyone interested in international law, human rights, and the ongoing evolution of justice mechanisms in response to atrocities and terrorism.

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There is a critical need for a comprehensive examination of the historical forces that have shaped the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from its colonial origins to the present day. Professor Joseph Massad has meticulously analyzed Western imperial involvement in Palestine, tracing the pivotal events that preceded and followed Israel's establishment. European colonial ambitions and policies have created the foundation for ongoing tensions in the region, demonstrating historical patterns of Western imperial expansion. Massad's perspective reveals the often-overlooked continuities between historical colonial projects and contemporary geopolitical realities, offering listeners a framework that challenges conventional narratives about the Middle East. A deep appreciation of the colonial roots of the powers influencing the region’s political makeup is needed to better understand the complex intersection of power, identity, and territorial claims that continue to define the Palestinian experience.

Professor Joseph Massad offers listeners rare insights drawn from decades of research on Middle Eastern history and politics. His analysis moves beyond simplified accounts to reveal the sophisticated interplay between Western imperial interests, Zionist aspirations, and Palestinian resistance throughout the past century. This approach confronts uncomfortable historical truths while providing a nuanced understanding of how external interventions have fundamentally shaped the region's trajectory. 

Join Sahar Aziz and Professor Joseph Massad for a conversation that adds necessary historical context to understand one of the world's most persistent conflict and the underlying tie to Western colonial desires.

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Genocide #ICC #HumanRights

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"Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine" examines the profound concept of sumud—psychological resilience and defiance—within the context of Palestinian life under occupation and settler colonialism. This episode explores psychoanalytic frameworks that illuminate the complex psychological expressions of both individual and collective endurance in circumstances of ongoing trauma and oppression. Clinical case studies reveal the sophisticated ways Palestinian mental health practitioners and communities navigate lives marked by systematic violence while actively resisting the narrative of victimhood. Moving beyond conventional human rights discourse, we will uncover how psychological resistance manifests as a form of political and existential assertion, offering new perspectives on trauma, healing, and identity in contexts of prolonged conflict.

Dr. Lara Sheehi brings her groundbreaking research to this episode, offering listeners rare insights into how psychoanalytic practice functions as both healing modality and resistance strategy in occupied Palestine. In her dialogue with Professor Sahar Aziz, Dr. Sheehi presents powerful clinical examples that demonstrate how Palestinian clinicians and their clients maintain dignity and agency despite overwhelming structural violence. Her analysis challenges traditional Western psychological frameworks that often fail to account for political realities and collective trauma responses. 

Join Sahar Aziz and Dr. Sheehi for this essential conversation about how mental health practices can honor Palestinian lived experiences while contributing to broader movements for justice and liberation in contexts of ongoing oppression.

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Genocide #ICC #HumanRights

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