Organizing Against A Genocide: Sherene Seikaly & Andrew Ross on National Faculty for Justice in Palestine

Speaking Out of Place

Since October the 7th we have seen an eruption of support for Palestinian liberation. On university campuses we find both the tremendous growth of activism for Palestine, and repressive and punitive measures that seek to discourage and curtail these activities. One of the most important tasks for activists is to organize broad networks of support. Today we speak with two people who have helped organize a network called National Faculty for Justice in Palestine, which now has close to 100 chapters in the US. Our conversation ranges from the genesis of this group and its goals, to an appreciation of how activism is now crossing boundaries that had formerly separated people in terms of status, rank, and discipline, and created new kinds of communities and energies that are broadly life-affirming and for the liberation of all.

Andrew Ross is a social activist and Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. A contributor to the Guardian, the New York Times, The Nation, Artforum, Jacobin, the London Review of Books, and Al Jazeera, he is the author or editor of 25 books and more than 250 articles on a wide variety of topics including labor and work, urbanism, politics, technology, environmental justice, alternative economics, music, film, TV, art, architecture, and poetry. Politically active in many movement fields, he's the co-founder of several groups: Gulf Labor Artist Coalition, Global Ultra Luxury Faction, Coalition for Fair Labor, Occupy Student Debt Campaign, and is an organizer with others, including the American Association of University Professors and the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. His books include Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, Incarceration; Sunbelt Blues: the Failure of American Housing; Stone Men: the Palestinians who Built Israel, and others.

Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a historian of capitalism, consumption, and development in the modern Middle East. Her book, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) examines British-ruled Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s through a focus on economy. In a departure from the expected histories of Palestine, this book illuminates dynamic class constructions that aimed to shape a pan-Arab utopia in terms of free trade, profit accumulation, and private property. And in so doing, it positions Palestine and Palestinians in the larger world of Arab thought and social life, moving attention away from the limiting debates of Zionist–Palestinian conflict. Her current book project follows the trajectory of a peripatetic medical doctor, her great grandfather, to place Palestine in a global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession. Sherene Seiklay is an editorial board member of the American Historical Review, co-editor of the Stanford Studies Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures Series, co-editor of Journal of Palestine Studies, and co-editor of Jadaliyya.