Jonathan Marc Gribetz, Professor of Near Eastern Studies, will speak about his newly published monograph Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy (Princeton University Press, 2024).

Jonathan Marc Gribetz is a Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and in the Program in Judaic Studies. He teaches about the history of Zionism, Palestine, Israel, Jerusalem, and religion and nationalism in the modern Middle East. He serves as co-editor of the Association for Jewish Studies journal, the AJS Review.

His first book, Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter (Princeton University Press, 2014), investigated the mutual perceptions of Zionists and Arabs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing the prominent place of religious and racial categories in the ways in which these communities imagined and related to one another. Defining Neighbors was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2015. Gribetz’s second book, Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy (Princeton University Press, 2024), analyzed the history of the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center and its studies of Jews, Judaism, Zionism, and Israel.