Miriam Elman is Executive Director of the Academic Engagement Network and Associate Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University. Her specialties are international relations, international and national security, Middle East, Israel studies, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, BDS & anti-Semitism, academic freedom and free speech. She will speak on the topic of the special issue of Israel Studies on Word Crimes, Reclaiming the Language of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

Conversation between Khaled Abu Awwad and Yakov Nagen.

Khaled Abu Awwad is the leader of an important Palestinian clan in Beit Umar. The clan was prominent in the first intifada but then took a turn and decided the way forward was coexistence. This happened after an Israeli group who had lost love ones came to give their condolences for the death of Khalid’s brother, who was shot by an Israeli soldier.

Yakov Nagen is the co-chair of the Abrahamic Reunion, an Israeli/Palestinian organization which seeks peace by making connections and working to make religion a unifying rather than a dividing factor. Yakov is also the Director of the Blickle Institute for Interfaith Dialogue and a Rabbi in the Otniel Yeshivah.

Yossi Klein Halevi is the author of Like Dreamers, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, and Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist. He is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. He will speak on the topic of his book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor.

Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of Palestinian Media Watch, which studies Palestinian society by monitoring and analyzing the Palestinian Authority (PA) through its media and schoolbooks.

Cary Nelson is Professor Emeritus of English and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was President of the American Association of University Professors between 2006 and 2012. In 2015 he published The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel (Wayne State University Press). In 2019 he published, Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State (Indiana University Press). In 2021, he wrote, Peace and Faith: Christian Churches and The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, with Michael C. Gizzi (Presbyterians for Middle East Peace, 2021), and Not in Kansas Anymore: Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities, (Academic Engagement Network, 2021).

Micha Odenheimer is the founder of Tevel B’tsedek, an organization that brings together people from Israel, Nepal and Zambia in order to to work with subsistence-farming villagers to achieve sustainable livelihoods.

Sara Reguer is Professor in the Department of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College. She is a renowned expert in Mandate Palestine/modern Israel, the history of Jewish women, Italian Jewry, and the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa. Sara published The Most Tenacious of Minorities: The Jews of Italy (Academic Studies Press, 2013), My Father’s Journey: A Memoir of Lost Worlds of Jewish Lithuania (Academic Studies Press, 2015), Opinionated: The World View of a Jewish Woman (Academic Studies Press, 2019), and most recently Winston S. Churchill and the Shaping of the Middle East, 1919-1922 (Academic Studies Press, 2020).

Yehuda Sarna is the Chief Rabbi of the Jewish Council of the Emirates. He is also the Executive Director of the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life at NYU, the University Chaplain for NYU and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Public Administration at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.