October 7

October 7: The Wars Over Words and Deeds is a collection of essays by scholars that seeks to analyze how words and imagery used to categorize the violence and savagery of the October 7th assaults by Hamas have been used to reframe the historical narrative of this century-long conflict into an avalanche of antisemitism and cultural toxicity that has attempted to reshape American society, impacting politics, media, and academia.

Edited by Jewish studies scholar and Middle East political scientist Donna Robinson Divine, and Asaf Romirowsky, historian and the executive director of both the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) and the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA), the essays collected in October 7: The Wars Over Words and Deeds offer a mixture of data-driven analysis with a careful account of narratives and ideology to measure how much of a footprint October 7 leaves on war and peace in the world going forward.

October 7: The Wars Over Words and Deeds exposes how Hamas savagery cast a destructive shadow not only over the men, women, and children caught on the battlefields of Gaza but also over the educators and journalists expected to explain why this atrocity occurred. Despite its brutality, Hamas won substantial support on campuses, in the media, and from an array of progressive movements. This terrorist organization's attacks, astonishing in their ambition, can only be fully understood by examining not only what has happened to Israel, Gaza, and to the Middle East but also to a world forced to respond to domestic protests echoing and supporting Hamas’ savagery. This distinctive volume illustrates the importance of engaging these complex issues with the rigors of scholarly tools. Only with these skills can the deeper story of October 7 be fully told. An essay from an undergraduate in the volume clarifies not only the importance of teaching students how to think about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, not what to think about it, but also that it can be done. The book shows that unless the nightmare that began on this fateful day is thoroughly understood, we will all be condemned to repeating and reliving it.

Asaf Romirowsky, PhD, is the executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) and the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) and a professor (affiliate) at the University of Haifa. Trained as a Middle East historian, he holds a PhD in Middle East and Mediterranean studies from King's College London and has published widely on various aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict and American foreign policy in the Middle East, as well as on Israeli and Zionist history. In 2013, he co-authored (with Alexander H. Joffe) Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief.

Romirowsky’s publicly engaged scholarship has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the National Interest, the American Interest, the New Republic, the Times of Israel, the Jerusalem Post, Ynet, and Tablet, among other online and print media outlets.

Donna Robinson Divine is the Morningstar Family Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies and Professor Emerita of Government at Smith College, where she taught a variety of courses on Middle East Politics. Fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, and Turkish, she has held visiting appointments at Yale, Harvard, and the Hebrew University, fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and Mellon Foundation, and won several Fulbright grants.

She is the author of many scholarly articles on a variety of topics in Middle East history and politics and the books Women Living Change (Women in the Political Economy) (with Susan C. Bourque), Politics and Society in Ottoman Palestine: The Arab Struggle for Survival and Power, and Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Her latest book is Exiled in the Homeland: Zionism and the Return to Mandate Palestine.

She was named the Katharine Asher Engel Lecturer at Smith College for the academic year in recognition of her scholarly achievements and Smith's Honored Professor for excellence in teaching.