Latest Publications
Director Jonathan Lincoln for Foreign Affairs: Overhaul UNRWA—Just Not Right Now
Foreign Affairs
March 29, 2024 | Foreign Affairs
"There has hardly been a war, crisis, or peace process involving Israel and an adversary that has not involved a UN response of some kind. Despite the UN’s many shortcomings, the assumption that any situation would be far worse without its involvement has generally been an accepted principle. The war that began with Hamas’s brutal attack on October 7 has challenged this assumption like never before, particularly for Israel. Despite years of working with the main UN agency that provides aid and services to Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, Israel is now seeking to dismantle it."
Prof. Orr interviewed by Moment Magazine: Teaching the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Through Film
Moment Magazine
March 14, 2024
"For the last ten years, literary and film critic Meital Orr has been teaching a course she developed titled “Re-examining the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Literature and Film” at Georgetown University. A professor at the university’s Center for Jewish Civilization, Orr has a doctorate in modern Jewish literature and a Master’s of Philosophy in Hebrew literature. When she first had the idea for the class, she was planning on featuring only literature, but she decided to include film because cinema, she feels, creates an immediate experience—an experience in real time—that is very impactful. “The emotional learning achieved by film is hard to equal,” she says. “Films have an incredible power to change minds and hearts.”"
Prof. Ori Soltes: Welcoming the Stranger out on 4/2/24
Fordham University Publication Press
March 10, 2024
Professor Ori Soltes's new book with Rachel Stern, Welcoming the Stranger: Abrahamic Hospitality and its Contemporary Implications, is set to release on April 2nd. Read below to learn more about the upcoming publication:
"One of the signal moments in the narrative of the biblical Abraham is his insistent and enthusiastic reception of three strangers, a starting point of inspiration for all three Abrahamic traditions as they evolve and develop the details of their respective teachings. On the one hand, welcoming the stranger by remembering “that you were strangers in the land of Egypt” is enjoined upon the ancient Israelites, and on the other, oppressing the stranger is condemned by their prophets throughout the Hebrew Bible.
These sentiments are repeated in the New Testament and the Qur’an and elaborated in the interpretive literatures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Such notions resonate obliquely within the history of India and its Dharmic traditions. On the other hand, they have been seriously challenged throughout history. In the 1830s, America’s “Nativists” sought to emphatically reduce immigration to these shores. A century later, the Holocaust began by the decision of the Nazi German government to turn specific groups of German citizens into strangers. Deliberate marginalization leading to genocide flourished in the next half century from Bosnia and Cambodia to Rwanda. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the United States renewed a decisive twist toward closing the door on those seeking refuge, ushering in an era where marginalized religious and ethnic groups around the globe are deemed unwelcome and unwanted.
The essays in Welcoming the Stranger explore these issues from historical, theoretical, theological, and practical perspectives, offering an enlightening and compelling discussion of what the Abrahamic traditions teach us regarding welcoming people we don’t know."