October 7 - by Asaf Romirowsky & Donna Robinson Divine (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

October 7 The Wars Over Words and Deeds cast a destructive shadow not only over the men, women, and children caught on the battlefields of Gaza but also over the educators and journalists expected to explain why and how it happened. Despite its brutality, Hamas won substantial support on campuses, in the media, and from an array of progressive movements. The Hamas attacks, astonishing in their ambition, can only be fully understood by examining the world's responses to them, and telling the full story of October 7 requires data-driven and textual analysis. This is a rare combination, but one that makes this volume distinctive and essential for all those who want to understand how such a nightmare both reflects our twenty-first-century world and permanently changes it.

Review Quotes

"This ambitious collection tackles a controversial topic, and it does so boldly and thoroughly. The essays provide a rich variety of views, diverse in focus, methodology, and findings. There are scholars of gender here, as well as military strategists, but also those who study terrorism, domestic politics, and antisemitism. There are humanities and social science scholars, quantitative and qualitative. An important, ambitious, and provocative read!"

--Ron Hassner, Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies, University of California, Berkeley

About the Author

Asaf Romirowsky, PhD, is the executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) and the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) and a professor (affiliate) at the University of Haifa. Trained as a Middle East historian, he holds a PhD in Middle East and Mediterranean studies from King's College London and has published widely on various aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict and American foreign policy in the Middle East, as well as on Israeli and Zionist history. In 2013, he co-authored (with Alexander H. Joffe) Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief.

Romirowsky's publicly engaged scholarship has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the National Interest, the American Interest, the New Republic, the Times of Israel, the Jerusalem Post, Ynet, and Tablet, among other online and print media outlets.

Donna Robinson Divine is the Morningstar Family Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies and Professor Emerita of Government at Smith College, where she taught a variety of courses on Middle East Politics. Fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, and Turkish, she has held visiting appointments at Yale, Harvard, and the Hebrew University, fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and Mellon Foundation, and won several Fulbright grants.

She is the author of many scholarly articles on a variety of topics in Middle East history and politics and the books Women Living Change (Women in the Political Economy) (with Susan C. Bourque), Politics and Society in Ottoman Palestine: The Arab Struggle for Survival and Power, and Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Her latest book is Exiled in the Homeland: Zionism and the Return to Mandate Palestine.

She was named the Katharine Asher Engel Lecturer at Smith College for the academic year in recognition of her scholarly achievements and Smith's Honored Professor for excellence in teaching.