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Donna Robinson Divine

Donna Robinson Divine

Donna Robinson Divine is the Morningstar Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Government, Emerita at Smith College where she taught a variety of courses on Middle East Politics. Her books include Women Living Change:  Cross-Cultural PerspectivesEssays from the Smith College Research Project on Women and Social Change;  Politics and Society in Ottoman Palestine:  The Arab Struggle for Survival and Power, Postcolonial Theory and The Arab-Israeli Conflict, and Exiled in the Homeland:Zionism and the Return to Mandate Palestine, Named the Katharine Asher Engel lecturer at Smith College for the 2012-2013 academic year in recognition of her scholarly achievements, she was also designated as Smith's Honored Professor for the excellence of her teaching. President of the Association for Israel Studies from 2017-2019, Affiliate Professor at Israel's University of Haifa she was named to Algemeiner’s 2019 list of the top 100 people “positively influencing Jewish life”.

All stories by: Donna Robinson Divine

Middle East Studies

I was recently told a story about a Jewish professor of Islamic studies who, some years ago, was seen standing bewildered outside the hotel gift shop at the annual conference of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) in a North…

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Settler Colonialism Backfires

Of all the catchwords hijacked by the study of the Middle East Conflict, none has turned taboos inside out more than settler colonialism. It is the linguistic warrant for bringing an indictment against Israel for denying Palestinians the freedom and…

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The Gatekeepers

ABSTRACT “The Gatekeepers” describes the reaction of a handful of well established Israel Studies scholars to a special issue of the journal Israel Studies called “Word Crimes: Reclaining the Language of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”. These professors preferred to denounce rather than…

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Moving Jerusalem from Heaven to Earth

Heaven and earth are said to meet on Jerusalem’s sacred esplanade where the city’s most famous resident is called God. But theological principles travel well beyond the splendor of these precincts turning ordinary struggles for power into battles between good…

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