A Colloquium With Sa'ed Atshan and Katharina Galor
Vegetarian and Vegan lunch provided

Berlin is home to Europe’s largest Palestinian diaspora community and one of the world’s largest Israeli diaspora communities. Germany’s guilt about the Nazi Holocaust has led to a public disavowal of anti-Semitism and strong support for the Israeli state. Meanwhile, Palestinians in Berlin report experiencing increasing levels of racism and Islamophobia. In The Moral Triangle, Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Israelis, Palestinians, and Germans in Berlin to explore these asymmetric relationships in the context of official German policies, public discourse, and the private sphere. They show how these relationships stem from narratives surrounding moral responsibility, the Holocaust, the Israel/Palestine conflict, and Germany’s recent welcoming of Middle Eastern refugees. They also point to spaces for activism and solidarity among Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians in Berlin that can help foster restorative justice and account for multiple forms of trauma. Highlighting their interlocutors’ experiences, memories, and hopes, Atshan and Galor demonstrate the myriad ways in which migration, trauma, and contemporary state politics are inextricably linked.

Dr. Sa'ed Atshan is Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College. He previously served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. He earned a Joint PhD in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies and an MA in Social Anthropology from Harvard University, and a Master in Public Policy (MPP) from the Harvard Kennedy School. He received his BA from Swarthmore in 2006. His research interests are at the intersection of peace and conflict studies, the anthropology of policy, critical development studies, and gender and sexuality studies. He has two forthcoming books with Stanford University Press: Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique and Paradoxes of Humanitarianism: The Social Life of Aid in the Palestinian Territories (Anthropology of Policy Series). He also has co-authored, with Katharina Galor, The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians, to be published with Duke University Press in 2020. Atshan has been awarded multiple fellowships from a wide range of organizations. He has worked for the American Civil Liberties Union, the UN High Commission on Refugees, Human Rights Watch, Seeds of Peace, the Palestinian Negotiations Affairs Department, and the Government of Dubai. He is also a Palestinian, Quaker, and LGBTQ human rights activist.

Katharina Galor is an art historian and archaeologist specializing in the visual and material culture of Israel-Palestine. She has excavated in France, Italy, and at various sites in Israel. In addition to her many years of teaching at Brown, she has also taught at the Hebrew University and the Ecole biblique et archéologique française in Jerusalem; at Tufts University and at RISD in the US; and most recently at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. She currently is the Visiting Hirschfeld Associate Professor at Brown University with a joint appointment in the Program of Judaic Studies and the Program of Urban Studies. Her publications include The Archaeology of Jerusalem: From the Origins to the Ottomans (co-authored with Hanswulf Bloedhorn; Yale University Press, 2013) and Finding Jerusalem: Archaeology Between Science and Ideology (University of California Press, 2017). She is also the co-editor of 5 books and has written more than 50 articles for journals or edited monographs. She is currently writing Gender and Temporality in Jewish Memory: A Visual and Material Cultural Analysis, a book project supported with a 3-year grant from the Leo Baeck Institute, Berlin.
Organized by the Department of Germanics with support from The Israel Studies Program of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, UW Honors, the Comparative History of Ideas, and the Jackson School of International Studies.