There is a dire need for an interdisciplinary examination of the human cost of occupation through the lens of daily Palestinian experience in the West Bank. This episode explores the critically acclaimed work of Nathan Thrall, whose immersive narrative provides rare insight into the lived reality of Palestinians navigating Israeli systems of control that define life under occupation. There are prefixed structural inequalities embedded in the segregated apartheid landscape of Jerusalem and the West Bank that Palestinians including those within the diaspora must face daily—displacement from ancestral lands, violence from settlers, and systematic discrimination. Thrall's Pulitzer Prize-winning book explores the personal dimensions of a conflict often discussed in abstract geopolitical terms.

Through intimate portrayals of individual Palestinians confronting institutional barriers and daily dignitary harms, his work humanizes the ancestral consequences of policies that separate communities, restrict movement, and create parallel legal systems based on ethnicity and religion. Pulitzer Prize winning author Nathan Thrall brings his unique perspective as an Israeli citizen who openly opposes what he describes as "the domination of one people by another" as perpetuated by the Israeli government.

In his conversation with Professor Sahar Aziz, Nathan Thrall shares powerful excerpts from his work that capture the apartheid conditions experienced by West Bank Palestinians who live under military occupation while neighboring Israeli settlements enjoy full rights and protection. His narrative approach moves beyond headlines and statistics to reveal the emotional and psychological toll of occupation on individuals and families caught in systems designed to maintain separation and inequality.

Join Sahar Aziz and Nathan Thrall in a conversation that offers listeners a deeper understanding of one of the world's most contested regions through the transformative lens of personal narrative and lived experience.

Recommended Reading:

Nathan Thrall,A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy(2023)

Resources on Palestine and Palestinians -RutgersCenter for Security, Race and Rights
resources/palestinefacts/

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Apartheid #ICC #HumanRights

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A central paradox has plagued and continues to plague the American right to vote: the American republic has always conditioned participation in the democratic process on an antidemocratic ideology of worthiness needed to exercise the rights of citizenship. This reality has shaped debates around the right to vote in the past and in the present and has made it more difficult for the law to embrace the rhetoric of a universal right to vote—that is, a right for all citizens to participate freely and fairly.

This is the defining dilemma of voting rights in American history. Indeed, the histories surrounding voting rights admit to the progress that was required to gain a more expansive right to vote for all American citizens, yet at the same time recognize that these rights are inherently and constantly contested. The continued contest around voting rights is ultimately attributable to this paradox.

An expert on voting rights law, Professor Atiba Ellis provides the historical, legal and political backdrop against which voting rights of racial minorities continue to be curtailed through manipulation of state laws. Professor Ellis explains how the Voting Rights Act of 1965 shifted from a powerful tool for affirmatively ending racial discrimination especially against African American voters to an ineffective safeguard against rising disenfranchisement of racial minorities.

Listen to the conversation between Professor Sahar Aziz and Professor Atiba Ellis about a topic that will shape the hotly contested November 2026 mid-term elections.

Recommended Readings

Atiba R. Ellis, The Voting Rights Paradox: Ideology and Incompleteness of American Democratic Practice, 55 Georgia L. Rev. 1553 (2021)

Atiba R. Ellis, Voter Fraud as an Epistemic Crisis for the Right to Vote, 71 Mercer L. Rev. 757 (2020).

Atiba R. Ellis, Tiered Personhood and the Excluded Voter, 90 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 463 (2015).

Sahar F. Aziz, The Blinding Color of Race: Elections and Democracy in the Post-Shelby County Era, 17 Berkeley J. Afr.-Am. L. & Pol'y 182 (2015).

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In today’s episode, guest host Nermin Allam, director of Women’s and Gender Studies and associate professor of political science at Rutgers University – Newark, speaks with Rusha Latif, author of Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution, to reflect on remembering and commemorating the January 25th uprising.

The January 25th uprising, which led to the ousting of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, remains one of the most consequential moments in Egypt’s modern political history. The uprising restructured political imagination, reordered lives, and briefly redefined what felt possible.

Every year, January 25th asks something of us. It asks us to remember. It asks us to reckon. And it asks us to return carefully and critically to a moment that continues to unsettle our present. This episode is part of that reckoning. As we mark the anniversary of the uprising, we are joined by Rusha Latif to revisit the experiences of the young people who animated that moment and who carried its weight forward long after the chants faded and the public space closed.

The conversation invites us to resist simplification and to honor the complexity of a revolutionary moment whose political afterlives still shape how we understand protest, possibility, and loss. It invites listeners to consider what it means to commemorate a revolution in a time when its promises remain unfinished.

Biography

Rusha Latif is an Egyptian-American researcher and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work focuses on social movements and revolutions in the Middle East, with an emphasis on leadership, organization, and collective action across lines of class, gender, religion, and ideology. Her research has been featured on NPR, Al Jazeera, and Jadaliyya. Her book, Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution is published by the AUC Press, in 2022).

Bio Link: https://rushalatif.com/

Publication: https://rushalatif.com/tahrirs-youth/

Nermin Allam is the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University-Newark. She is a nonresident fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Allam’s research focuses on gender politics and social movements in the Middle East and North Africa. Allam’s work has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Mobilization, Politics & Gender, PS: Political Science & Politics, Democratization among other journals.

Link:

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