Jewish Tenured Prof FIRED Over Tweet, Palestine Documentary BANNED By Israel

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Katie is joined by Maura Finkelstein a tenured Jewish professor of Anthropology at Muhlenberg College fired over an Instragram repost about Zionism. Then Katie talks to Rami Younis, a Palestinian writer, journalist, activist and co-director of "Lyd," a science fiction documentary he co-directed about the once-thriving Palestinian city of Lyd. Rami reacts to Israel's recent decision to ban the film.

Maura Finkelstein is a writer, ethnographer, and associate professor of anthropology. She is the author of The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai, published by Duke University Press in 2019. Her writing has also been published in Anthological Quarterly, City and Society, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology Now, Post45, Electric Literature, Allegra Lab, Red Pepper Magazine, The Markaz Review, the Scottish Left Review, Mondoweiss, and Al Jazeera. She has been nominated for a Pushcart (2021), was a finalist for the Witness literary award (2022), was a Tin House Scholar (2023), and was recently the recipient of the 2024 New Directions Award from the General Anthropology Division (GAD) of the American Anthropological Association.

Rami Younis is a Palestinian filmmaker, writer, journalist and activist from Lyd. He was a 2019-20 Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School. As a journalist, he mainly wrote for the online magazine +972 and served as both writer and editor of its Hebrew sister site, “local call”, a journalistic project he co-founded, designed to challenge Israeli mainstream journalism outlets. Rami served as a parliamentary consultant and media spokesperson for Palestinian member of Knesset (Israeli parliament) Haneen Zoabi. Rami is also co-founder and manager of the first ever “Palestine Music Expo”: an event that connects local Palestinian music scene to the world wide industry. Younis was the host of the Arabic-language daily news show, “On the Other Hand."

Lyd is a feature-length, sci-fi documentary that shares multiple pasts, presents, and futures of the city of Lyd in Palestine/Israel. From the perspective of the city herself, voiced by Palestinian actress Maisa Abd Elhadi, the viewer is guided through the lifespan of a five-thousand-year-old city and its residents. Lyd was once a thriving Palestinian city with a rich history. In 636AD, It was even considered the first capital of Palestine. When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, Lyd became an Israeli city, and in the process, hundreds of Lyd’s Palestinian residents were massacred by Israeli forces, and most of the city’s 50,000 Palestinian residents were exiled. Today, the city has a Jewish Israeli majority and a Palestinian minority and is disinvested and divided by racism and violence. For Palestinians, Lyd’s story is a painful and tragic fall from grace, which is why the film dares to ask the question: what would the city be like had the Israeli occupation of Lyd never happened?

Using never-before-seen archival footage of the Israeli soldiers who carried out the massacre and expulsion, the city explains that these events were so devastating that they fractured her reality, and now there are two Lyds –– one occupied and one free. As the film unfolds, documentary portions follow a chorus of characters through their daily lives, creating a tapestry of the Palestinian experience of this city, and vivid animations use the language of speculative fiction to envision an alternate reality where the same documentary characters live free from the trauma of the past and the violence of the present. As the film cuts between fantastical and documentary realities, it ultimately leaves the viewer questioning which future should prevail.