Unpacking Zionism

In this final episode of Empire's Laboratory, Alex Aviña is in the interview seat, with Emmaia Gelman as guest host. Alex extends the concept of “Palestine-Mexico border” from the present backward in time to the Cold War, and throughout Latin America as a site of colonization and resistance.

Alex Aviña is an Assistant Professor of History at Florida State University. | See website

Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside

Notes from the Palestine-Mexico Border, Nacla

Indigenous Anti-Communism: Haunting Spectre of Ward Churchill w/ Nick Estes, The Red Nation Podcast

Who Owns the American Historical Association? Israel, the war lobby, and the fight for Palestine

In this episode, host Barry Trachtenberg speaks with Adam Rzepka, professor of literature at Montclair State University, about his Chronicle of Higher Education report on the American Historical Association's decision to veto member-passed resolutions condemning scholasticide in Palestine and academic repression. Rzepka's reporting reveals that AHA leadership spent at least $170,000 on Thorn Run Partners, a Washington lobbying firm whose clients have included suppliers to the Israeli military and a West Bank settlement builder, and that a lobbyist from the firm attended the January 2026 Council meeting, warned of advocacy-related risks, and departed shortly before the Council vetoed the resolutions. The ep. covers what was publicly known about the 2025 and 2026 votes against what was happening behind the scenes and what the Council's new willingness to use its veto, retain a lobbyist, and intervene in its own elections means for how the association might handle future member action on other matters.

Adam Rzepka is Associate Professor English College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Montclair State University and author of "A Scholarly Association’s Secretive Washington Playbook,” published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. (Instagram Post) | Non-paywalled

Barry Trachtenberg holds the Rubin Presidential Chair in Jewish History at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and is on the Advisory Board of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.

• 2025 Scholasticide Resolution
• Historians for Peace and Democracy
• Historians for Palestine | Website | Instagram
• Palestine Historians Group’s “We Refuse to be Silenced: The Palestinian Historians Group Responds to the AHA Council Vetoes”
• JVP Academic Council Statement on the American Historical Association, Scholasticide, Genocide, and Academic Freedom Resolutions
• Barry Trachtenberg, "Historians Have a Duty to Condemn Scholasticide in Gaza,” Jacobin (January 20, 2026)
• Alan Parkes, "The American Historical Association, Scholasticide, and the Inherent Politics of History” Academe Blog, (February 10, 2026)
• US Scholars Speak, "Confronting the Palestine Exception of the American Historical Association,” (July, 6, 2026)

In this episode of In Flames, Meira Gold & Roy Eidelson discuss a new Zionist "antisemitism training" aimed at students in psychology PhD programs. The program is funded and promulgated by the Academic Engagement Network (AEN).

The pilot program introduces "antisemitism" training into psychology programs across New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.

Links & Resources

• Drop the AEN
• This is Not the New Curriculum Psychology Students Need | Roy Eidelson
• From Above: Academic Engagement Network (AEN) | With Sean Malloy and Meira Gold
• In Flames: APA Resolution | With Barry Trachtenberg, Lara Sheehi, & Jordan Dunn
• Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: An Interview with Lara Sheehi by Jess Row for The Racial Imaginary Institute
• Northwestern students blocked from enrollment after refusing controversial antisemitism training

Find other podcast episodes on our website at criticalzionismstudies.org/our-work/podcast-unpacking-zionism/

Find ICSZ on Social Media!:

Instagram: @institutecsz

Facebook: @Institute-for-the-Critical-Study-of-Zionism

BlueSky: bsky.app/profile/critzstudies.bsky.social

Taylor Miller is a writer and researcher based between the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts. She earned her Ph.D. in political geography from the University of Arizona. Taylor is a Contributing Editor and writer for Columbia University’s Avery Review, and other recent works are featured with Social Text, Al Mayadeen, Weird Economies, The New Inquiry, Protean, with forthcoming essays in Yale School of Architecture’s Perspecta, Antipode and Kohl Journal. She’s motivated by border abolition and cactus propagation.

Resources:

https://averyreview.com/issues/70/silicon-wadi-silicon-desert

https://proteanmag.com/2024/05/13/against-these-walls-a-unity-of-struggle-from-gaza-to-sonora/

https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/walking-through-walls-and-scaling-the-roof-direct-action-to-end-the-genocide-in-palestine/

Bios:

Lara Sheehi: is a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa’s Institute for Social and Health Sciences, a licensed clinical psychologist, and the host of the Psychic Militancy podcast. Lara’s work focuses on psychoanalysis, the psychic refusals central to liberation struggles and life-making in the Global South, the psychic dimensions of resistance and revolution, and critical Zionism studies. She is author of the forthcoming book, From the Clinic to the Streets Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures (Pluto, 2026) and the co-author, with Stephen Sheehi, of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine which won the Middle East Monitor’s 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is a member of the founding collective for the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and is on the advisory board for Forensic Architecture.

Jordan Dunn: is a licensed clinical psychologist based in New York City. He works as a supervising psychologist and organizer for community action and reflection at the Greene Clinic, a sliding scale, community psychoanalytic, training clinic. He also serves as a council representative at the American Psychological Association representing APA Division 39 the society of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychology. Trained at the New School for Social Research, he has received multiple fellowships, and publishes on psychotherapy and culture. He organizes locally with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and is part of Jewish Psychologists for Justice, a grassroots organizing group fighting for collective liberation.

Barry Trachtenberg: is a historian of modern Jewish history and the Holocaust and author of several books on Jewish history and the Nazi Holocaust. He has published on issues related to American support for Israel, Zionism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism in venues such as Jewish Currents, the Guardian, Jacobin, the Forward, Electronic Intifada, and Mondoweiss. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Boards of Jewish Voice for Peace and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, the steering committee of the Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network, and is Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers Law School. He holds the Rubin Presidential Chair in Jewish History at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC.

Episode's resources:

https://mondoweiss.net/2025/12/stop-calling-right-wing-criticism-of-israel-anti-zionism/

In this episode, Alex and Lara talk with Danya Nadar about the ways Zionism  is implicated in the ongoing destruction and plunder of land and resources in Guatemala, especially  through imported land-based practices and irrigation technologies, and  the ways that Indigenous people continue to resist.

Bio: Danya Nadar is an Egyptian-Canadian PhD candidate affiliated with the Institute of Development Policy (IOB) at the University of Antwerp since 2020. From 2009, Danya worked as a documentary film and news producer focusing on social and political economy topics in North Africa and east of the Mediterranean, and where she is also part of the revolutionary media collective mosireen.org. In 2018 she switched careers to pursue her passion, conducting research alongside Indigenous peasant farmers. She was a research fellow (2019-2020) at the International Development Research Centre in Canada which allowed her to continue the research she had started in occupied Palestine (2018-2019) on ancestral knowledges related to seeds, land tenure, gendered social dynamics, and alternative/parallel food networks. Her current research looks at the interconnected ways food is weaponized by relationally comparing the colonization of Palestine (past to present) with that of Ch’orti’ territories in Guatemala’s east, and the ways ancestral knowledges related to land, seeds, and cosmo vision to resist land encroachment and dispossession towards reconstitution of ancestral territories.

Show notes:

https://agroecologynow.net/agricultural-research-in-times-of-the-eu-race-to-arms/

Antony Loewenstein book: https://antonyloewenstein.com/books/the-palestine-laboratory-how-israel-exports-the-technology-of-occupation-around-the-world/

Nadim Bawalsa is a historian of modern Palestine and the author of Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948 (Stanford University Press, 2022), winner of the 2023 Nikki Keddie Book Award and the 2023 Palestine Book Award. He is the associate editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

Shownotes:

Nadim's book: https://www.sup.org/books/middle-east-studies/transnational-palestine

Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile's Road to Socialism by Peter Winn: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/weavers-of-revolution-9780195045581

Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora by Sarah Gualtieri ucpress.edu/book/9780520255340/between-arab-and-white

Extra readings from Nadim:

Nadim Bawalsa with the Arab Center Washington DC: https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/transnational-palestine/

On the limits of Palestinian-Chilean solidarity with Palestine today: https://fromtheperiphery.com/2025/09/29/206-the-limits-of-palestinian-ness-w-pablo-abufom/

A special issue in JPS on Palestinian migration before 1948: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rpal20/46/2?nav=tocList

Episode's resources:

Iran and the US Anti-War Movement

https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/25872/Iran-and-the-US-Anti-War-Movement

Iran in Crisis: Seven Essays on the Obstacles to Freedom

https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/47192/Iran-in-Crisis-Seven-Essays-on-the-Obstacles-to-Freedom-Introduction

Raha Iranian Feminist Collective

https://www.rahafeministcollective.org/

Havaar: Iranian Initiative Against War, Sanctions, and State Repression

https://web.archive.org/web/20230209153914/http://havaar.org/category/campaign/

https://www.instagram.com/feminists4jina/

https://www.instagram.com/decolonize_anarchism/

Introducing a new series of podcast shorts: In Flames. Episodes are anti-Zionist hot takes on what's happening right now. With rotating hosts from the Institute's Collective and Advisory Board. Subscribe so you don't miss new episodes.