• The Long Road to Bethlehem Part Four

    +972, December 19, 2015 “I’m leaving.” I tell people in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. The words sound unexpected and foreign in every language, as though someone else is speaking them. While I’ve resigned from my post at the university and someone has already been hired to teach my fall classes, I haven’t given my landlady …

  • This is What Palestinian Youth Really Want

    The World Post at The Huffington Post, October 19, 2015 It’s Friday morning and East Jerusalem is on lockdown, the city’s Palestinian neighborhoods cut off by new, hastily erected checkpoints — massive cement blocks manned by Israeli soldiers. In Tel Aviv, however, it’s the beginning of the weekend, and it feels like it. The streets …

  • Women in the Middle East: Jordan- on Gender, Education, and the Limits of the Western Imagination

    Los Angeles Review of Books, January 20, 2013 On the last day of the semester at Al-Quds University in the West Bank, I entered the classroom to find the usual graffiti on the whiteboard, save for an odd symbol. It was a triangle filled with curlicues, topped by two circles with dots in the middle. …

  • Palestinian Roundtable on Gender, Education, and Life in the West Bank

    Los Angeles Review of Books, January 20, 2013 The following interview was conducted with four 18-year-old Palestinian women who attend a university in the West Bank. All of the women are Muslim, though they run the gamut as to the extent of their religiosity: Nawal self-defines as liberal; Salma says that she and her family …