Keynote Event
The Israeli Diaspora in Global Perspective
Monday, April 13, 2026
4-6 PM
Rapaporte Treasure Hall in the Goldfarb/Farber Library
Register by March 30
The keynote event will be a roundtable discussion featuring Sa'ed Atshan (Swarthmore College), Joshua Lambert (Wellesley College), and Faith Smith (Brandeis University), and chaired by Alexander Kaye (Brandeis University).
The word "Diaspora" was first coined to refer to ancient Jews living outside the land of Israel. Today there are many diasporas living outside their homelands, contending with questions of otherness and belonging, cultural exchange and assimilation.
Thinking about experiences of diaspora has become even more urgent during these times of mass migration. Diasporism has also given rise to a fruitful body of theory dealing with subjects such as hybrid identities and rhizomic social networks that challenge the centrality of state-centred politics.
How does the Israeli diaspora fit into this model, and how might scholars of Israeli diasporism learn from and contribute to a multidisciplinary conversation? This keynote panel, featuring an interdisciplinary panel of experts on Yiddish, Caribbean, and Palestinian history, culture and literature, will explore these important questions.
Discussants
Sa’ed Atshan is Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Anthropology at Swarthmore College. He is the author of "Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford, 2020), coauthor of "The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians" (Duke, 2020), co-editor of "Reel Gender: Palestinian and Israeli Cinema" (Bloomsbury, 2022). He is also the author of "In a Land of Aid: Essays on the Palestinian Condition" (Stanford, forthcoming).
Josh Lambert is the Sophia Moses Robison Professor of Jewish Studies and English, and director of the Jewish Studies Program, at Wellesley College. He is the author of the books "The Literary Mafia" (Yale, 2022), "Unclean Lips" (NYU, 2014) and American Jewish Fiction (JPS, 2009), and the co-editor of "How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish" (Restless Books, 2020). His book reviews and essays for general audiences have appeared in publications including the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic, Jewish Currents, and Lilith.
Faith Smith’s work on the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries includes "Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean’s Non-sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century" (2023), and "Creole Recitations: John Jacob Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late Nineteenth-Century Caribbean" (2002). She is the editor of "Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean" (2011). She is working on “DreadKin,” a project on fiction and visual culture in our contemporary moment. She chairs the Department of African and African American Studies at Brandeis University.
Chair
Alexander Kaye is the Director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University, where he occupies the Karl, Harry, and Helen Stoll Chair in Israel Studies and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies. Dr. Kaye's research centers on Jewish intellectual history and the history of political and legal thought. His book, "The Invention of Jewish Theocracy: The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern Israel" (OUP, 2020), received the Baron Prize from the AAJR, the Leon Charney Book Award from Yeshiva University, and was a finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award (2021). With David N. Myers, he co-edited "The Faith of Fallen Jews," a collection of works by the late Prof. Yosef H. Yerushalmi. In 2024 he edited "The Collected Works of Rabbi Yitzhak Halevi Herzog," the translated works of Israel's first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi.