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Weeam Hammoudeh is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Community and Public Health (ICPH), Birzeit University, a Visiting Scientist at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University and co-Director of the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights. Her research seeks to understand how political, social and structural factors shape health, as well as how health systems and social institutions develop and shift in relation to political, economic, and structural transformations. 

Barak Heymann has been directing and producing documentaries for TV and cinema for more than 20 years. Heymann Brothers Films, the independent film company led by Barak and his brother Tomer, has produced over 30 documentaries, some as international co-productions. Their films have premiered in numerous festivals worldwide, such as Berlinale, IDFA, and Hot Docs, where they have won prestigious awards. 

Ari Ariel is an Associate Professor of Instruction in History and International Studies, and the director of the International Studies Program, at the University of Iowa. Born in New York City to a Yemeni father and Ashkenazi mother, most of his academic work is semi-autobiographical: he focuses on Middle Eastern Jewish communities, particularly Yemeni Jews, and writes about migration, identity, and changes in cultural practice, especially foodways. Ariel's publications in this field have included work on: the transformation of Middle Eastern Jewish foodways in Israel under the pressure of the Ashkenazi melting pot, and later the creation of New Israeli Cuisine; the “ethnicization” of Yemeni food and identity in Israel, a process through which various pre-migration local practices were reimagined as parts of a single Yemeni ethnic culture; and the “Hummus Wars,” a conflict over the national ownership of hummus, “fought” primary between Lebanon and Israel.

Adrienne Krone is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Sustainability and Religious Studies at Allegheny College. She has a Ph.D. in American Religion from Duke University, and her research focuses on religious food justice movements in North America. Her current research project is an ethnographic and historical study of the Jewish community farming movement. Krone researches the contemporary Jewish Community Farming movement, which began with the founding of Adamah in 2004 and now consists of about twenty innovative and pluralistic organizations spread throughout the United States and Canada. The Jewish Community Farming movement organizations are joined by their shared values which include sustainability, stewardship, food justice, and building community. These organizations run programs that vary widely for individuals and groups of all ages and last anywhere from a couple hours to months long fellowships and apprenticeships. Through these programs Jews get their hands dirty planting, weeding, harvesting, and eating food while learning about Jewish environmental values, traditions, and laws. Across these organizations, hundreds of farmers, educators, administrators, and program participants have discovered, built, and/or deepened their Jewish identities by reconnecting to their local environment and foodways through their engagement in this movement.

Ronald Ranta is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Kingston University London and a former chef. His research focuses on the intersection of food, identity, security, and politics. He is the co-editor of the Palgrave book series Food and Identity in a Globalised World, and the co-editor of the recently published volume Going Native?: Settler Colonialism and Food (Palgrave 2022). In the context of Israel/Palestine, Ranta uses food as a prism to bridge the gap between how Israeli, and to a lesser extent Palestinian, nationalism and national identity have been and are produced and experienced in daily life, and the historical, political and social developments that brought about and maintain the Israeli nation-state. He is particularly interested in understanding the relationship between Israeli and Palestinian identities and food cultures; the ways in which the latter impacts the former; and the meaning of decolonization in the context of food.

Nora Rubel is the Jane and Alan Batkin Professor in Jewish Studies and Chair of the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester. Rubel teaches and writes on a wide variety of topics related to gender, race and ethnicity in American religion, particularly in relation to food and popular culture. She is the author of Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination (Columbia University Press 2009), co-editor of Religion, Food and Eating in North America (CUP 2014) and the in-progress Transparent: Queering the Jewish Family on TV. She is also completing a monograph entitled Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of The Settlement Cook Book.Rubel teaches and writes on religion and foodways. At the University of Rochester, she teaches “Kitchen Judaism: Jewish Food Beyond the Bagel and the Bible” and “Culinary Conversions: Religion, Food, and Eating in America.” In her scholarship, Rubel takes cookbooks as an entry point to her study of religious identities. She has written about the ways that cookbooks both reflect and reinforce religious and cultural practices. Her current book project, Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of The Settlement Cook Book, is a cultural biography of a book that while originally meant as a way to Americanize new Jewish immigrants, in successive acculturated generations became a nostalgic means of connecting to a traditional Jewish past. Rubel examines the cookbook as an influential example of Jewish—but not necessarily Judaic—material culture and discusses twentieth century Jewish Americanization through a lens of culinary pluralism.

This symposium is part of our ongoing Embodied Judaism and Israel-Palestine Studies series, and is supported by the David Shneer Fund for Community Programming, Public Scholarship, and the Arts. 

, a New York-based filmmaker, is a NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute - News and Documentary Program - graduate. Ahmed was born and raised in a refugee camp in Gaza Strip, Palestine. He worked as an organizer, translator, and guide for international journalists covering the 2014 war. He made a series of short films highlighting the humanitarian crisis in Gaza Strip after three successive wars. He has also worked as a reporter for the Washington Report on the Middle East Affairs in Washington DC. He runs his own production company specializing in short videos, and is skilled in all aspects of filmmaking. He is a graduate of an extensive course in storytelling form Storywise Center. Ahmed has received residencies and fellowships from Duke University and the Paths to Peace Leadership Program.

graduated from Tel Aviv University’s Film and Television Department (BFA) and New York University’s Cinema Studies Department (MA), earning a PhD in Critical Cultural Studies and Film from the University of Pittsburgh. His academic work has been awarded grants by, amongst others, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Israel Institute, and the International Association for Media and History. He has essays published or forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, and is the co-editor (with Rachel S. Harris) of Casting a Giant Shadow: The Transnational Shaping of Israeli Cinema (Indiana University Press, 2021). Dan served as Artistic Director of the EU-funded initiative “Another Look: The Restored European Film Project” (2013-2017), and also offered curatorial support to the Pittsburgh Jewish Israeli Film Festival, New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, and the French Institute-Israel (Tel Aviv). He is also an avid photographer and trained filmmaker, whose short subject fiction and experimental films have been screened in various venues worldwide, including the Zebra Poetry Film Festival (Berlin), Tirana International Film Festival, Brooklyn International Film Festival, ARTFilm Slovakia, Invideo Milan, and the International Festival of Short Films on Culture (Jaipur, India).

is the Schusterman Chair of Israel Studies and Assistant Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma.  Her research is on the history of immigration, the history of medicine/public health and the history of Israel.  Originally from Canada, Professor Seidelman has a B.A. and an M.A. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Ph.D. from Ben Gurion University of the Negev.  Before moving to Oklahoma, she taught at Ben Gurion University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Her book Under Quarantine: Immigrants and Disease at Israel’s Gate (Rutgers, 2020) tells the story of Shaar Ha’aliya, Israel’s “Ellis Island” during the mass immigration that followed the establishment of the state in 1948.  Seidelman’s book focuses on the conflicts surrounding the camp’s medical quarantine of Israel’s new immigrants.  Currently Professor Seidelman is working on two new projects.  Claiming My Egypt explores questions of identity among the children of Egypt’s Jewish diaspora.  Zionism, Tuberculosis and the Making of the 20^th Century is a book on patients’ experiences with tuberculosis in Palestine/Israel from 1882 until today.  Dr. Seidelman’s articles have been published in The American Journal of Public Health, The Journal of Israeli History, AJS Perspectives, and �Ჹ’a����ٳ�.

is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Community and Public Health, where she teaches in the MPH program and is also the coordinator for the mental health unit. She holds a PhD and MA in Sociology from Brown University, and an MPH from Birzeit University. She has an academic interest in understanding how political and social transformations impact health, psychosocial wellbeing, and population processes, particularly in conflict areas, as well as how health systems and social institutions develop and shift in relation to political, economic, and structural factors. She is currently involved in research project on a range of topics, including the health of adolescent refugee girls, deprivation and mental health, uncertainty, and health system preparedness in the COVID response.