Israel-Boycott Opponents

The following professors are opponents of boycotts of Israeli scholars, universities, goods, and services.

Middle East Studies

Hayal Akarsu: Postdoctoral Associate, Department of Sociology, Brandeis University.

Myron Aronoff: Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Rutgers University. Areas of expertise: comparative politics and ethnography; Middle East (Israel/Palestine).

Dan Ben-Amos: Professor of Folklore & Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Pennsylvania.

David Cook: Professor of Religion, Rice University. Areas of expertise include early Islam, Muslim apocalyptic literature and movements for radical social change, dreams, historical astronomy, Judeo-Arabic literature, and West African Islam.

Donna Robinson Divine: Morningstar Family Professor of Government and Director of Middle East Studies Emerita, Smith College. Areas of expertise include the Arab-Israeli conflict, Ottoman Palestine, Middle East history and politics, and Muslim and Jewish cultures. Contributor to The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel.

Alan Dowty: Professor of Political Science, Emeritus; University of Notre Dame. Areas of expertise include the Arab-Israel conflict; Israeli politics, Middle Eastern international relations, and international relations.

Dale F. Eickelman: Ralph and Richard Lazarus Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Human Relations; Relationship Coordinator (Director), The Dartmouth College-American University of Kuwait Program; Member of the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Program; Dartmouth University.

Robert O. Freedman: Adjunct Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University. Peggy Meyerhoff Pearlstone Professor of Political Science Emeritus, Baltimore Hebrew University. Areas of expertise include Russian foreign policy toward the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Anna Geifman: Professor Emerita of History, Boston University. Areas of expertise include political extremism and terrorism, history of the Russian revolutionary movements, and psychohistory.

Jonathan Golden: Assistant Professor of Religion and Director, Center on Religion, Culture and Conflict, Drew University. Areas of expertise include religious conflict and terrorism, world archaeology; Jewish diaspora communities; ethnography of the Middle East and Latin America; and human evolution, with a special focus on the inter-face between science and religion.

Peter B. Golden: Professor Emeritus of History, Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies, Rutgers University. Areas of expertise include the history of medieval Eurasia and the interaction of the Turko-Mongolian steppe peoples with the neighboring sedentary states (Rus’, Byzantium, the Caucasus, and the Islamic world); Ethnogenesis; and Turkic philology.

Judith L. Goldstein: Professor of Anthropology, Vassar College. Conducted ethnographic and archival research in Iran, Israel, Paris, and Rome. Her doctoral fieldwork was done in Yazd, Iran in the 1970s among Shi’i Muslims, Jews and Zoroastrians. After the 1978-1979 Iranian revolution, she did research with Iranian immigrants and on Farsi language theater in Israel. Publications include An Innocent Abroad: How Mulla Daoud was Lost and Found in Lebanon, Iranian Ethnicity in Israel: The Performance of Identity, and Iranian Jewish Women’s Magical Narratives.

James E. Lindsay: Professor of Middle East History, Colorado State University. Areas of expertise include the history and historiography of the Islamic Near East in the Middle Ages.

J. Mark Long: Director of Middle East Studies Emeritus, Baylor University. Areas of expertise include contemporary Islamic fundamentalism and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Robert Rabil: Professor, Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Political Science, Florida Atlantic University. Areas of expertise include Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, US-Arab Relations, Reform in the Arab World and Radical Islam and Terrorism.

Bernard Reich: Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, George Washington University. Areas of expertise include Middle Eastern politics, terrorism, U.S.-Israel relations, Arab-Israeli conflict, Israel, and oil politics.

Franck Salameh: Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Department of Slavic & Eastern Languages, Boston College. Areas of expertise include Literary Arabic and History of Middle East Linguistics.

Philip Carl Salzman: Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, McGill University. Areas of expertise include Iran and India.

Saliba Sarsar: Professor of Political Science and Associate Vice President for Global Initiatives, Monmouth University. Areas of expertise include the Arab-Israeli conflict and democratization.

Kemal Silay: Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies Endowed Chair Professor, Indiana University, Bloomington. Areas of expertise include Ottoman and Turkish history and literature, Turkish language studies.

Kenneth Stein: William E. Schatten Professor of Contemporary Middle Eastern History, Political Science and Israeli Studies Emeritus; Emory University. Areas of expertise include Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Contributor to The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel.

John W. Swails: Director of the Center for Israel and Middle East Studies, Oral Roberts University. Areas of expertise include Iraq and Israel.

Mark S. Wagner: Professor of Arabic, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures; Louisiana State University. Areas of expertise include Classical Arabic literature, Arabic vernacular literature, Islamic law, and Muslim-Jewish relations.

Harold (Hal) Waller: Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, McGill University. Areas of expertise include U.S. budgetary process as a focal point of the struggle over public policy, American politics, research methods, Jewish political studies, and Israeli politics.

Birol Yesilada: Professor of Political Science and International Studies; Contemporary Turkish Studies Endowed Chair; Director of the Center for Turkish Studies; Portland State University. Areas of expertise include Turkish politics, international political economy, and the European Union.

Moonlighters (Non-experts who write and/or teach about the Middle East)

George Giacumakis: adjunct history professor, California State University, Fullerton; Director of the Museum of Biblical and Sacred Writing, Biola University. Delivered the 2014 lecture, “The Modern Middle East and Israel.” Formerly taught at Jerusalem University College in Israel.

Sabah A. Salih: Professor of English, Bloomsburg University. Teaches the Senior Seminar: “The Idea of Fate in Modern Middle Eastern Literature” and post-colonial literature. Contributor to The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel.

Israel Studies

Ami Pedahzur: Director, Institute for Israel Studies; Arnold S. Chaplik Professor in Israel and Diaspora Studies; Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin. Areas of expertise include radicalism, political violence, terrorism, and the ways by which societies and states cope with such challenges, especially in Israel and the Middle East.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150423020514/http://www.pedahzur.com/

S. Ilan Troen: Stoll Family Chair in Israel Studies, Emeritus, Brandeis University. Publications include Jews and Muslims in the Arab World; Haunted by Pasts Real and Imagined. Contributor to The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel.

Jewish Studies

Isaac Alteras: Professor of History, Queen’s College. Areas of expertise include modern Jewish history and US-Israeli relations.

Joëlle Bahloul: Professor of Anthropology, Affiliated with Jewish Studies, Indiana University. Areas of expertise include Europe and North Africa. Publications include The Sephardic Jew as Mediterranean? A View From Kinship and Gender and From a Muslim Banquet to a Jewish Seder. In Arabs and Jews: Contacts and Boundaries.

Marc S. Bernstein: Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Muslim Studies, Michigan State University. Areas of expertise include Hebrew and Israeli culture, and the intersection of Jewish and Islamic civilizations.

Steven Bowman: Professor of Judaic Studies; Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies - Affiliate Faculty; University of Cincinnati. Areas of expertise include Women in the Bible, Jews in Byzantium, Book of Yosippon, holocaust and resistance in Greece during World War II.

Matti Bunzl: Professor of Anthropology, Affiliated with Jewish Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Publications include Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe, Theodor Herzl’s Zionism as Gendered Discourse, and “Anthropologists are Talking About Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism in the New Europe.”

Mark R. Cohen: Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East and Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus Princeton University. Areas of expertise includes Jewish history in medieval Muslim countries.

Sam Edelman: California State University, Chico emeritus professor of Jewish, Israel and Holocaust Studies as well as Rhetoric and Communication Studies. Areas of expertise include the Arab-Israeli conflict and Zionism. Contributor to The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel.

Rachel S. Harris: Associate Professor of Israeli Literature and Culture in Comparative & World Literature and the Program in Jewish Culture & Society; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Contributor to The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel.

Aaron W. Hughes: Philip S. Bernstein Professor of Jewish Studies, Department of Religion and Classics, University of Rochester. Areas of expertise include Judaism, intellectual history, historiography, theory, method, and religion.

Jacob Lassner: Professor of History and Religion, Philip M. & Ethel Klutznick Professor of Jewish Civilization Emeritus, Northwestern University. Areas of expertise include Medieval Near Eastern History, and Jewish-Muslim relations.

Avigdor Levy: Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University. Areas of expertise include the Arab-Israel Conflict, Ottoman empire, and Jews in Muslim countries.

Haim Shaked: Director of the Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies, University of Miami. Areas of expertise include the Arab-Israeli conflict and Sudan.

Norman Stillman: Professor and Schusterman/Josey Chair in Judaic History and Director of Judaic Studies Emeritus, University of Oklahoma. Areas of expertise include medieval and modern Jewish and Islamic history.

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