Donna Robinson Divine, at The Blogs

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May 27, 2024, 7:47 AM

7 October: The Campus ‘18th Brumaire’

HEGEL REMARKS SOMEWHERE THAT ALL GREAT WORLD-HISTORIC FACTS AND PERSONAGES APPEAR, SO TO SPEAK,TWICE. HE FORGOT TO ADD: THE FIRST TIME AS TRAGEDY, THE SECOND As Farce. The campus crusade directed at Israel’s war against Hamas mirrors the performative politics...

May 24, 2024, 7:02 PM

Preserving pomp and ignoring the circumstances

It must say something about American higher education that so many university presidents are applauded for ending weeks of student encampments protesting the Gaza War that threatened to disrupt graduation ceremonies. The resumption of the normal end of semester...

Jan 4, 2024, 4:00 PM

We didn’t start the fire

Who started the fire matters less than how the ‘fire’ is defined. Does ‘fire’ mean Israel’s war against Hamas or is the correct reference to Hamas’ sadistic massacre that gave Jews their worst disaster since the Holocaust? There is...

Nov 2, 2023, 4:41 AM

The Gaza War: The Hostile Takeovers

In their agonizing reactions to the failures to anticipate Hamas’ October 7 butchery, Israeli officials have fixated on their misguided framework presuming the terrorist organization more interested in raising Gaza’s standard of living than in fulfilling its ambition to...

Oct 21, 2023, 5:23 PM

Word Crimes: Explaining The Gaza War on Campus

The Hamas attacks on October 7 have, according to specialists, altered the nature of the Middle East Conflict, yet the discourse on the university campus remains largely the same. For all its presumed expertise, the academic study of the...

Sep 11, 2023, 7:13 PM

Calling Diaspora Jews: שְׁמַע קוֹלֵֽנוּ

Never before have Israelis been so divided. Saturday night protests have become rituals canonized into the sacred task of saving Israel’s ‘democracy’ and rescuing the country from a crib-death at the hands of the current coalition. That Israel’s judicial reform...

Aug 9, 2023, 5:43 AM

Israel’s Judicial Agenda: How Did This Happen?

The current disturbances engulfing Israel seem to have awakened a panorama of horrors summoning comparisons to those associated with איכה . That there is a linguistic link in Hebrew between Lamentations and ‘how’ makes an obvious question insistent: how...

May 8, 2023, 7:38 AM

קול דודי דופק [My Beloved Knocks]

Pre-eminent theologian Rabbi Joseph Soloveichik viewed Israel’s founding as imbued with religious meaning. Acknowledging the brilliant diplomacy of Zionist leaders that gathered the votes to confirm the UN Partition Resolution, the Rav, as he was called, also saw the...

Apr 18, 2023, 7:43 AM

Let’s talk ‘dugri’ about the reforms

Is there any feeling more surprising than optimism regarding Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians when the country is marking its 15th week of turbulence? At the very moment when pundits claim half the population of the country is at...

Apr 3, 2023, 8:14 AM

Are ‘things falling apart’ in Israel?

The pundits got one thing right about Israel’s judicial reform proposals—final votes in the Knesset on its core elements would not be taken during the winter legislative session. But they got almost everything else wrong. For that reason, it...

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About Me

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. Able to draw on material in Hebrew, Arabic, and Turkish, her books include Women Living Change: Cross-Cultural Perspectives; Politics and Society in Ottoman Palestine: The Arab Struggle for Survival and Power, Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Exiled in the Homeland: Zionism and the Return to Mandate Palestine, and Word Crimes: Reclaiming The Language of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.