Speaker profile last updated by AAE Talent Team on 03/31/2025.
For many Jewish people in the mid-twentieth century, Zionism was an unquestionable tenet of what it meant to be Jewish. Seventy years later, a growing number of American Jews are instead expressing solidarity with Palestinians, questioning old allegiances to Israel. How did that transformation come about? What does it mean for the future of Judaism?
Professor Atalia Omer examines this shift through interviews with a new generation of Jewish activists, rigorous data analysis, and fieldwork within a progressive synagogue community. She highlights people politically inspired by social justice campaigns including the Black Lives Matter movement and protests against anti-immigration policies. These activists, she shows, discover that their ethical outrage at US policies extends to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. For these American Jews, the Jewish history of dispossession and diaspora compels a search for solidarity with liberation movements. This shift produces innovations within Jewish tradition, including multi-racial and intersectional conceptions of Jewishness and movements to reclaim prophetic Judaism. Charting the rise of such religious innovation, Omer points toward the possible futures of post-Zionist Judaism.
The Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel has its own distinctive legacies of Palestinian-Jewish activism. This lecture retrieves and examines those legacies with a particular focus on the thirty years from 1993 to 2023. During this period, the Jewish anti-occupation independent Left turned away from prioritizing Left secular internationalist ideologies as grounds for regional and international visions of equality between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. Instead, antioccupation Judaism began to interpretively reconsider what “Jewish” identity and tradition might mean in Palestine/Israel through intersectional and decolonial ways of thinking. Why and how did this transition occur? How might these developments be instructive Palestine/Israel activism and solidarity-seeking in the present moment? What does it teach about conceiving and reconceiving the ethical and religious dimensions of Judaism?
Based on extensive ethnographic research and field work in Israel/Palestine, this lecture explores the sources, implementation, and practical effects of Jewish-Israeli activist "co-resistance" with Palestinians. In the lecture, Professor Omer both recognizes the challenges of "normalization" raised by Jewish-Israeli co-resistance with Palestinians but also demonstrates how the challenges and temptations of normalization can be navigated and overcome.
Though sometimes overlooked or downplayed, in fact, the ethical, religious, and historical dimensions of Judaism offer numerous resources for non-violent thinking and organizing. What are the most pivotal examples of this? How can these resources best be retrieved, conceptualized, practiced in ways that most effectively support resistance and aid in transforming injustice and violations of human rights and international law in support of co-resistance with Palestinians?
Atalia Omer is a keynote speaker and industry expert who speaks on a wide range of topics such as Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians, What is “Jewish” About the Jewish Left in Palestine/Israel?, Jewish-Israeli Co-Resistance with Palestinians: Interrogating Zionism from a Jewish Religious and Human Rights-based critique of Zionism and Non-Violent Resources in the Jewish Religious and Ethical Tradition for Resisting and Transforming Injustice against Palestinians. The estimated speaking fee range to book Atalia Omer for your event is $5,000 - $10,000. Atalia Omer generally travels from Chicago, IL, USA and can be booked for (private) corporate events, personal appearances, keynote speeches, or other performances. Similar motivational celebrity speakers are Roya Hakakian, Amy Goodman, Yuval Noah Harari, Susannah Heschel and Ronald W. Zweig. Contact All American Speakers for ratings, reviews, videos and information on scheduling Atalia Omer for an upcoming live or virtual event.
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