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

Book Synopsis

October 7: The Wars Over Words and Deeds is a collection of essays by scholars that seeks to analyze how words and imagery used to categorize the violence and savagery of the October 7th assaults by Hamas have been used to reframe the historical narrative of this century-long conflict into an avalanche of antisemitism and cultural toxicity that has attempted to reshape American society, impacting politics, media, and academia.

Edited by Jewish studies scholar and Middle East political scientist Donna Robinson Divine, and Asaf Romirowsky, historian and the executive director of both the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) and the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA), the essays collected in October 7: The Wars Over Words and Deeds offer a mixture of data-driven analysis with a careful account of narratives and ideology to measure how much of a footprint October 7 leaves on war and peace in the world going forward.

October 7: The Wars Over Words and Deeds exposes how Hamas savagery 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 this atrocity occurred. Despite its brutality, Hamas won substantial support on campuses, in the media, and from an array of progressive movements. This terrorist organization's attacks, astonishing in their ambition, can only be fully understood by examining not only what has happened to Israel, Gaza, and to the Middle East but also to a world forced to respond to domestic protests echoing and supporting Hamas' savagery. This distinctive volume illustrates the importance of engaging these complex issues with the rigors of scholarly tools. Only with these skills can the deeper story of October 7 be fully told. An essay from an undergraduate in the volume clarifies not only the importance of teaching students how to think about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, not what to think about it, but also that it can be done. The book shows that unless the nightmare that began on this fateful day is thoroughly understood, we will all be condemned to repeating and reliving 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

"An essential volume for anyone concerned to understand Hamas's October 7 massacre, the ensuing war, and their many ramifications for the Jews, Israel, the West, and the world as a whole. Particularly invaluable for its analyses of the massive failure of the academy, whose professors and students, guided by their corrosive ideology, somehow mistook a barbaric medieval atrocity for virtuous freedom-fighting, while the administrators looked on in effective complicity. When academics openly endorse terror, the surrounding society is in trouble--and this volume is an indispensable first step in mounting a truly appropriate 'resistance' to the ideological capture of the academy."

--Andrew Pessin, Professor of Philosophy, Connecticut College

"Hamas's 10/7 massacres were the deadliest terrorist atrocity of modern times and the largest massacres of Jews since the Holocaust. Yet rather than awaken the world to the global danger of genocidal jihadism, it stirred an unprecedented wave of antisemitism and glorification of the decades-long Palestinian attempt to destroy the world's only Jewish state. Donna Robinson Divine and Asaf Romirowsky have done an indispensable job in debunking this collective madness by exposing the true nature of the 10/7 monstrosity and its far-reaching regional and global implications. A must read."

--Efraim Karsh, Emeritus Professor of Middle East & Mediterranean Studies, King's College London

"These rich, compelling, thought-provoking, scholarly essays seek to assess a cataclysmic event which is still unfolding, with an academic rigor increasingly out of fashion. The authors--and the editors--have done a remarkable job of fulfilling both ambitious goals. It's not easy to resist political posturing or moralizing when analyzing the horrific violence of October 7, and the resulting challenges Israel faced, while exposing the global campaign on campuses and elsewhere to demonize the Jewish state and justify mass murder and mass rape. But trusting the facts, their training, and their judgment, these meticulous scholars illuminate the confusing but monumental war over words and deeds that continues to reverberate worldwide, not just in the Middle East. Together, they have produced a volume that should launch the kind of balanced, reflective conversations we need in the classroom, in the media, in government offices, and in the public square."

--Professor Gil Troy, author, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to October 7 and its Aftermath.

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.