Yael Berda will discuss recent events in Israel/Palestine in light of her new book Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship: Legacies of Race and Emergency in the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2022).  She will examine the relation between Israel’s control over Palestinians and the authoritarian overhaul proposed by the Netanyahu government sparking the largest protests in the country this past spring. 

Berda is associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Hebrew University, having received her PhD from the Princeton sociology department and her LLB from the Hebrew University faculty of law.  She was a human rights lawyer before coming to Princeton, in military, district and supreme courts. Her previous books are Living Emergency: Israel’s Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank and The Bureaucracy of the Occupation.  She is also a fellow at the Middle East initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School. 

David Abraham is Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Miami. He has a B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.  Prior to Miami, Abraham taught German and European history in the History department at Princeton University.    Abraham has published widely on issues of politics and economics in Germany and is the author of The Collapse of the Weimar Republic (1981, 1988, 2024).  More recently he has written on immigration and citizenship law with a particular focus on citizenship in a neo-liberal era and problems of social solidarity and integration in Germany, Israel, and the US.  Several of his articles appear in a collection, Who Belongs to Us?—Wer gehört zu uns (2019).

Yair Mintzker is Behrman Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History at Princeton.  He specializes in the history of early modern and modern Germany. His latest monograph, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss (Princeton UP, 2017) is a retelling of the trial and execution of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, the notorious “Jew Süss.” The book won the National Jewish Book Award in History and was chosen by the Financial Times as one of the best books of 2017.  Born and raised in Jerusalem, Mintzker received his M.A. in history from Tel-Aviv University and his Ph.D. from Stanford.

Kim Lane Scheppele will moderate the discussion. Scheppele is the Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs and Director of the Program in Law and Normative Thinking (PLANT) at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton.  She studies declining democracies and her work on ‘autocratic legalism’ featured prominently in the pro-democracy demonstrations in Israel this past spring.   Her book Destroying Democracy by Law is forthcoming from Harvard University Press next year. 

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