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This chapter focuses on “human rights” as a framework youth use to highlight issues of national sovereignty and imperial violence, engaging in transnational solidarity movements but also encountering political repression. In the context of the U.S.-backed occupations in Palestine, however, human rights seemingly fails to be legible in the U.S., revealing the exceptions of humanitarian/human rights politics. The chapter discusses the process of “Palestinianization” or political socialization through Palestine solidarity activism that is embedded in the racialization of Palestinians and Arabs and their exclusion from rights. It documents instances of censorship and backlash facing Palestine solidarity and BDS activists and examines the ways in which involvement in “radical” or risky politics is a transformative experience for youth.

This chapter examines the deep roots of black-Palestinian solidarity in the anticolonial critique from the Global South or Third Worldism as a layered subtext for examining explicit solidarity of the Movement for Black Lives ("Black Lives Matter") with Palestinians. The chapter also traces histories of black-Jewish affinities in the US and the changing dynamics of such affinities precipitated by Jews' "moral choice" to become white as well as the tension between the devaluation of African American and African lives and the recognition of the Holocaust as tragedy and its victims as grievable. An engagement with Micahel Rothberg's notion of "multidirectional memory" reopens the possibility of connecting the narrative of the Holocaust to the colonial experiences of genocide and, with it, de-linking Jews from orientalist civilizational narratives while (re)linking them to antiracist, postcolonial critique and solidarity struggles. The chapter shows that grappling with whiteness becomes increasingly critical to retrieving prophetic interpretations of the Jewish tradition while refashioning the normative boundaries of Jewish identity.

This introductory chapter illuminates the liturgical function of the Days of Awe in the Jewish imagination. It extends the meanings of the liminality of the Days of Awe as a lens through which to trace ethnographically the grappling of American Jews with the meanings of Israel, diaspora, their complicity with the occupation of Palestinians as well as with whiteness, privilege, and American racism. The chapter foregrounds the intersection of gender, race, and religion as actual resources actively operational in the processes leading American Jews to reassess the meanings Israel and Palestine occupy in their identity, ethical commitment, and religiosity. The reassessment of the meanings of Israel and the ethical engagement with the occupation generates and reveals processes of atonement and mourning hence the theme of the relentlessness of the Days of Awe as a distinguishing characteristic of Jewish Palestine solidarity. Further, inhabiting the twilight of the Days of Awe, relentlessly explains,the interlinking of social justice foci and the resourcefulness and relevance of marginal Jewish voices as constituting key pathways for decolonizing Jewishness. The chapter further outlines the structure of the book and anticipates conclusions pertaining the intersectional and relational dynamics of reimagining Jewishness through social movement.

This chapter traces the employment of liturgy and religious symbols in grassroots social movement protest. It shows how a social movement that offers an explicitly Jewish critique of Israeli policies and the American Jewish establishment can, at the same time, substantively expand and alter the meaning of Jewish traditions. The grassroots process generates new forms of religiocultural and historical literacy as well as new authorities.

Chapter Two tracks how Black Power organizers and activists performed solidarity with Palestine by drawing on the knowledge produced by the PRC. Black Power’s Palestine fashioned an anti-colonial imagined geography driven by race-conscious critiques of the incorporative modalities of U.S. imperialism.

The Introduction outlines the book’s theoretical framework and historical scope. It introduces the concepts racial relationality, imperial culture, permanent war, and the politics of comparison, and identifies the locus of the U.S., Israel, Palestine entanglement in a nascent neoliberalism.

Chapter One situates this entanglement in competing post-Holocaust discourses of racial expertise and Cold War geopolitics. It provides a genealogy of the 1975 United Nations resolution 3379, condemning Zionism as a form of racism. Key are the scholar-activists of the PLO’s Palestine Research Center (PRC) and U.S. state agents like Daniel Patrick Moynihan articulating Cold War American exceptions.

Chapter Four situates the emergence of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism within the growing knowledge production of a community of scholars of Arab descent. It illuminates a contrapuntal analytic attentive to the incommensurable connections between U.S. settler conquest, the Holocaust, and the dispossession and dehumanization of Arab communities.

Against the backdrop of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Chapter Five locates Black poet-activist June Jordan’s “Moving Towards Home” amid intensive disputes amongst U.S. feminists about the differentiated lived experiences of racism, Zionism, and anti-Semitism. In doing so, it tracks the absent presence of Palestine in Women of Color feminisms.

Chapter Three interrogates how the suture between Zionism and American Jewishness was fashioned amid racial justice struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A range of Jewish writers and activists connected their orientations towards Cold War liberalism both to the intensification of U.S. state violence and to the military supremacy and existential vulnerability of the Israel after 1967.