Wednesday, April 2 · 7 - 8pm EDT, Odyssey Bookshop, 9 College Street South Hadley, MA
Our American Israel by Amy Kaplan Panel Discussion
By Odyssey Bookshop
Join us on Wednesday, April 2 at 7 PM for a panel discussion with Mark Firmani, Judith Frank, and Mary Renda on Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance by the late Amy Kaplan. The panel will be moderated by Elizabeth Garland.
About the Event - Amy Kaplan’s Our American Israel was first published in 2018; shortly after, the author, a longtime 5-College colleague, was diagnosed with the brain cancer that would take her life in 2020. Our American Israel examines popular narratives in American news media, fiction, and film, and shows how they helped create a shared sense of identity between two nations that both had histories as settler societies.
Since that time, the events of October 7, 2023 and the subsequent destruction of Gaza have made Kaplan’s insights more urgent than ever. It is therefore our honor to celebrate the release of Our American Israel in paperback, so that its imperative message can reach more people and so it may continue to shape the conversation about the U.S.’s deeply embedded relationship with Israel.
About the Panelists
Mary Renda, Emily Dickinson Professor of History at Mount Holyoke, is the author of Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of US Imperialism, 1915–1940 (UNC Press, 2001) and most recently, an essay, “Indigenous Women Confront New Formations of State Violence and Global Capital” in Voices of Indigenous Women in North America, American Empire, and the Global South, 1820-2020, A Syllabus with Documents (Alexander Street Press, 2024). Her current book project examines the founding of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary as a chapter in the history of North American settler colonialism.
Mark Firmani received his JD from Yale Law School and his PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania. Amy Kaplan chaired his dissertation committee as he completed a project exploring how Iraqi writers have used fiction to critique the international laws that licensed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and occupation. During his time at Penn, he also worked as Amy's research assistant while she finished Our American Israel. He teaches at Amherst College.
Judith Frank is the author of Crybaby Butch (Firebrand Books, 2004), and All I Love and Know (William Morrow, 2014), which explores the Israeli occupation of Palestine through the domestic life of a Jewish-American gay man who inherits two children after his twin brother and sister-in-law are killed in a Jerusalem bombing. They are currently at work on a collection of linked short stories about American and Israeli Jews living their lives during the Palestinian genocide. They teach at Amherst College.
RSVP: Our American Israel by Amy Kaplan Panel Discussion Tickets, Wed, Apr 2, 2025 at 7:00 PM | Eventbrite