Writes stuff: Jewishness, Zionism, Race, Pol/Soc Theory, SWANA Jews.
Teaches at QMUL
Book - A Family in Fragments: Race, Zionism and Retrievable Futures (Rutgers University Press, 2027)
Loading...
Fascists in Belfast set fire to buildings with people inside them. People of colour left work early to stay indoors.
This is being actively encouraged by the world’s richest man whose openly pro-white nationalist platform X is still used by the UK government
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
So no, this isn't about playing zero sum games of less Jewish representation vs more Muslim/Arab representation. Cultural production doesn't sit outside of politics and history.
He's asking us to consider the connection between the production of a whitened, but acceptably different Jewish subject in US culture, and a broad public affinity for one of Zionism's central claims: that Jews are different enough to merit an ethno-state, but civilised just like 'you'.
In the essay, Salaita isn't saying there should be less Jews on TV, he's asking us to consider the cultural milieux that humanises some people and dehumanises others.
I wouldn't blame Salaita if he took a less generous view on Shoah education. During a genocide when the Shoah is regularly deployed to justify the evisceration of Palestinian flesh, this is a remarkably humanistic statement.
THREAD: It's telling how many supposed leftists jumped straight to the anti-Arab/Palestinian/Islamophobic position of "angry Palestinian man thinks there should be less Jews on TV" trope when they read this essay. There's literally nowhere in the essay where Salaita says this.
Rather, it's about the broader socio-political context into which Jewish cultural production speaks. And while this is unfortunate, frustrating, etc, it is also real, and something that Jewish leftists, if they want to be actual allies to Palestine (a big assumption perhaps) need to reckon with END
THREAD: It's telling how many supposed leftists jumped straight to the anti-Arab/Palestinian/Islamophobic position of "angry Palestinian man thinks there should be less Jews on TV" trope when they read this essay. There's literally nowhere in the essay where Salaita says this.
It's the opposite: here's what he has to say about Ellie Wiesel's memoir, Night: "Only a ghoul would suggest that the Nazi Holocaust should be ignored. But it requires a comparable ghoulishness to make it so that other genocides are minimized in order to sanctify the Nazi Holocaust".
There is no neutral Jewish cultural production under Zionism because Zionism is in a parasitical relationship with it. This isn't about the intention of people producing Jewish culture, although "Israel only got mentioned once in the whole of Seinfeld" is kind of meaningless when this happens 👇
Protests across the city turned violent on Tuesday night – with some police officers acting as if it wasn’t safe to intervene
