Research

Book Project

In my manuscript, I trace the political arc of IfNotNow from the summer of 2014 to the fall of 2024 as the organization navigated the boundaries of the American Jewish establishment, the American Palestine solidarity movement, and the anti-Jewishness embedded in American white Christian supremacy. I draw on a large archive that includes over fifty interviews with activists, hours of participant observation, dozens of IfNotNow’s internal organizational documents, and hundreds of public facing messages from and about IfNotNow.

On the surface, this dissertation is a study of IfNotNow, its founders and leaders, and the political, social, and cultural forces that shape American Jewish activists as they disentangle their Jewishness from their Zionism and support for Israel. I analyze the emotional and political arcs of IfNotNow activists, which are shaped by experiences of belonging, betrayal, and racial ambiguity as they navigate the political, social, and cultural terrain of American Jewish support for and opposition to Israel. I examine multiple moments of rupture and reorientation that changed IfNotNow’s relationship to the American Jewish establishment, to Palestinian liberation movements, and to multiracial, multiethnic, and multifaith organizing in the United States.

Beneath the surface, in tracing IfNotNow’s political arc, this dissertation illuminates how American Jews engage with the white Christian supremacist and hegemonic frameworks that undergird American politics. I use IfNotNow to make two interconnected arguments. First, I argue that American Jewish whiteness is predicated and conditioned on American Jewish Zionism and support for Israel, and that the American Jewish establishment’s commitment to defending Israel is an expression of its commitment to and investments in whiteness. Second, I argue that activists in the American Palestine solidarity movement - Jewish and non-Jewish - simultaneously work against and participate in the racialized religious frameworks of white Christian supremacy in which American power structures are grounded. IfNotNow’s political arc, the challenges that members face in navigating their understanding of and relationship to power, and the organization’s slow path to coalition-building show how, even as activists struggle against white Christian supremacy and imperialism, they are limited by their own entrenchment in these systems.

My research is one of the first studies to bring the fields of Arab American and Jewish American Studies together. In bringing these fields into conversation, my dissertation demonstrates the interconnectedness between antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism, revealing how the contemporary impulse to read antisemitism and Islamophobia as being antipathetic plays into the broader goals of White Christian nationalism. Despite the similarities in how Arab American Studies and Jewish American studies address and challenge traditional frameworks of racism and racialization, the fields are rarely in conversation with one another; rather, they are often in competition and conflict. Through my interdisciplinary education and scholarship, which draws on literary analysis, black feminist theory, and feminist ethnography - both methodologically and theoretically - I offer a multidimensional perspective and approach to my scholarship. As a scholar in Judaic Studies, Arab and Muslim American Studies, and American Studies, I approach my research with deep familiarity of the intellectual, cultural, political and emotional attachments to this work.

Through IfNotNow’s story, I offer a reconsideration of American racialization, the power structures and violence it enacts, and how it shapes US political movements for Palestine. In a political moment when social identity is mobilized in the service of the US empire, it is more important than ever to insist that liberation must be understood as relational and dependent upon shared struggle.