SALON 5 will present a public debate staged as a congressional session amongst the public and previous salon participants on the initiation of Birthright Palestine. Invited debaters, along with the public, will argue all sides of the case and its possible implications.

The debate will be followed by a democratic vote. If the public votes against the creation of a Birthright Palestine, then Public Movement’s Final Action in New York will be canceled.

SUSAN AKRAM is a Clinical Professor at Boston University School of Law, teaching immigration law, comparative refugee law, and international human rights law, and supervising students handling refugee and asylum cases. Before joining the faculty at BUSL in 1993, she was Executive Director of Boston’s Political Asylum/Immigration Representation (PAIR) Project. She is a past Fulbright Senior Scholar in Palestine, teaching at Al-Quds University Law School in East Jerusalem and researching durable solutions for Palestinian refugees.

SA'ED ATSHAN is a joint PhD candidate in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University where he is a Soros Fellow, National Science Foundation Fellow, and Graduate Student Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He received an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in 2008. Atshan received his BA from Swarthmore College in 2006 and completed high school at Ramallah Friends School, a Quaker institution which has been in Palestine for over a century. He has worked for the American Civil Liberties Union, the UN High Commission for Refugees, Human Rights Watch, Seeds of Peace, the Palestinian Negotiations Affairs Department, and the Government of Dubai. He is also a Lecturer in Peace and Justice Studies at Tufts University. Atshan was born into a Palestinian refugee family and was raised in the Occupied Territories.

HANNAH ARENDT is a German-American political theorist whose work deals with the nature of power, the subjects of politics, authority, and totalitarianism. After fleeing to the United States in 1941, she taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton, Northwestern, and Yale Universities, as well as the University of Chicago, the New School, and the University of Muri. Her works include: Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), On Revolution (1963), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Men in Dark Times (1968), and On Violence (1970).

ARIELLA AZOULAY teaches visual culture and political philosophy. She has written and published: Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (forthcoming, Verso, 2012), From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950, (Pluto Press, 2011), and The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008). Her curated exhibitions include: “Potential History” (2012, STUK/Artefact, Leuven; Digital Art Center, Holon), “Untaken Photographs” (2010, Igor Zabel Award, the Moderna galerija, Ljubljana; Zochrot, Tel Aviv), and “Architecture of Destruction” (Zochrot, Tel Aviv). Her films include: Civil Alliance, Palestine, 47-48 (2012), I Also Dwell Among Your Own People: Conversations with Azmi Bishara (2004), and The Chain Food (2004).

NADIA LATIF is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Human Rights at Bard College. She has been conducting field research in Bourj al-Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp since 2004. She has written about questions of home and belonging to place, Palestinian camp refugees’ experience of forced displacement in Lebanon, and issues of gender in protracted conflicts. Her work has been published in New Centennial Review, Arab Studies Journal, and Feminist Review.

BRUCE ROBBINS is the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He works mainly in the areas of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, literary and cultural theory, and postcolonial studies. He is the author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (NYU, 1999), The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below (Columbia, 1986; Duke, 1993), and Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (Verso, 1993). He was co-editor of the journal Social Text from 1991 to 2000. He is presently at work on a documentary about American-Jewish critics of Israel.