Disclaimer: Professor Omer's views are her own and do not represent the beliefs of other Jewish people. 

This talk will examine recent ethnographic research on Jewish wrestling with Zionism and the social mechanisms underpinning processes of unlearning militarist accounts of Jewish safety as well as the conflation of Jews with the policies of a nation-state project. 

Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Politics from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on religion, violence, and peacebuilding as well as theories and methods in the study of religion and Palestine/Israel. She was a Andrew Carnegie Fellow, resulting in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Conversing with decolonial scholarship across multiple fields of study, this book examines, through an extensive empirical work in Kenya and the Philippines, how and why the practices of religion and peacebuilding/development both reinforce and exceed global structural, neocolonial, and epistemic forms of violence.

We look forward to a respectful Q & A about this important topic following the presentation.

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