Co-presented with Artis.

SALON 2 will feature academic experts presenting positions on scholarly issues related to a Palestinian right of return and the Israeli law of return. Topics may include religion and secularism, the dynamics of nationalism and diaspora, definitions of citizenship, ideas of return, the possibility of financial compensations for displaced Palestinians, and the status of the Palestinian community in New York. Members of the public will be called upon to register their own positions. Held in the historic Orozco Room, which features José Clemente Orozco’s 1931 mural Table of Universal Brotherhood, a suitable setting for the promise of return.

Speakers:

Gil Anidjar is Associate Professor in the Departments of Religion and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. He is the author of ‘Our Place in al-Andalus’: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters (Stanford University Press, 2002); The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford University Press, 2003); and Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford University Press, 2008). Anidjar is also the editor of Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Religion (Routledge, 2002).

Rochelle Davis is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Her research focuses on refugees and conflict. Her book, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced, (Stanford University Press) was the co-winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award to recognize outstanding publishing in Middle East studies.

Lubna Hammad is a Palestinian legal consultant and human rights activist. She is a founding member of Adalah-NY: The New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel, in New York. Lubna currently works on transformative justice issues in West Asia and North Africa.

Hagar Kotef is a current fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the regime of movement employed by Israel in the occupied Palestinian Territories. It seeks to examine a new mode of subject-formation operating outside of normalizing regimes and underlying what we may call the paradigm of security. She has published essays in journals such as Signs, Theory Culture and Society, Politics & Gender, Feminist Studies and others.

About Public Movement Public Movement (founded 2006, Tel Aviv) is a performative research group which investigates and stages political actions in public spaces. In the last five years, Public Movement has explored the regulations, forces, agents, and policies, formations of identity and systems of ritual which govern the dynamics of public life and public space. Public Movement has organized events, rituals, and political situations through consultation and collaboration with scholars, experts, and ongoing group debates and discussions. The Movement was founded in November 2006 by co-leaders Omer Krieger and Dana Yahalomi until August 2011 when Yahalomi assumed sole leadership. Public Movement actions take place in public space and in collaboration with art, theatre, dance, and academic institutions in Israel and abroad.

Occurred at: Vera List Center for Art and Politics
The New School, Orozco Room
66 West 12th Street, 7th floor