The San Diego World Affairs Council Co-Sponsored Event
Monday, February 17th, 2025
7:00pm - 8:30pm
San Diego State University, Arts and Letters 201 – or live stream via Zoom
PARKING: Parking Structure 12 (Aztec Bowl, San Diego, CA 92182)
DIRECTIONS: https://htm.sdsu.edu/documents/ps12_map.pdf
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR ZOOM
Free to members & the public, available via Zoom. Pre-registration required.
About the program
The San Diego World Affairs Council is co-sponsoring the in-person and Zoom presentation by acclaimed author and columnist Peter Beinart. Beinart will discuss his new book “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza” with SDSU Professors Jonathan Graubart and Manal Swairjo. The book confronts the dominant “pro-Israel” narrative, which features a recurring Jewish experience of persecution and victimhood that endures even amid Israel’s destruction of Gaza. That narrative, Beinart argues, both warps our understanding of Israel-Palestine and erases the richness of the Jewish experience. He imagines an alternate narrative of what it means to be a Jew and how to reckon with injustices perpetrated in the name of the Jewish people. In this future, Israeli Jews have the right to equality, not supremacy, while Jewish and Palestinian safety and dignity are co-dependent, not mutually exclusive.
As Adam Hochschild writes, “At this painful moment, Peter Beinart’s voice is more vital than ever. His reach is broad—from the tragedy of today’s Middle East to the South Africa he knows well to events centuries ago—his scholarship is deep, and his heart is big. This book is not just about being Jewish in the shadow of today’s war, but about being a person who cares for justice.”
The other sponsors of this event are:
1) San Diego State University organizations: Political Science Department, ISCOR, Jewish Studies, Center for Islamic and Arabic Studies.
2) UC San Diego organizations: Department of Communication, Center for Study of Religion, and Middle East Studies.
3) San Diego chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
4) San Diego Hinenu Havurah.
About the speakers
Peter Beinart is a professor of journalism and political science at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. He is also editor at large for Jewish Currents, publisher of The Beinart Notebook, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, and an MSNBC analyst. Peter Alexander Beinart was (born February 28, 1971). His parents were Jewish immigrants from South Africa (his maternal grandfather was from Russia, and his maternal grandmother, who was Sephardic, was from Egypt). His father's parents were from Lithuania.
Jonathan Graubart is a professor and chair of the SDSU Political Science Department. He is the author of Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism: Lessons from Hannah Arendt and other Pariahs (Temple University Press 2023). Graubart is a co-founder of Hinenu Havurah, a progressive Jewish collective in San Diego.
Manal Swairjo is a professor of biochemistry at SDSU. Her research focuses on RNA biogenesis processes and their links to human disease. Dr Swairjo was born in Gaza, Palestine. Much of her family in Gaza was killed by Israel’s destructive assault. In San Diego, she co-founded a Jewish-Palestinian dialogue in 2000 after the collapse of Oslo and the outbreak of the second Intifada.
