Joseph Massad

Joseph Massad
Born	1963 Jordan
Nationality	Palestinian
Citizenship	United States
Academic background
Alma mater	Columbia University
Doctoral advisor	Edward Said
Academic work
Institutions	Columbia University

Joseph Andoni Massad (born 1963) is a Palestinian American Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, whose academic work has focused on Palestinian, Jordanian, and Israeli nationalism.

He is also known for his book Desiring Arabs, about representations of sexual desire in the Arab world.

Massad became the center of a controversy over anti-Zionism, antisemitism, and academic freedom in 2004 and 2005.

Education and career

Joseph Andoni Massad is of Palestinian Arab descent, but was born in Jordan in 1963. He received his PhD in Political Science from Columbia in 1998.

Colonial Effects (2001)

Massad's first book, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan, was published in 2001 by Columbia University Press. The book is based on Massad's PhD dissertation, which won the Middle East Studies Association Malcolm Kerr Dissertation Award in 1998.

Over the course of a detailed history of the Jordanian state, from its inception in 1921 to 2000, Colonial Effects makes a theoretical intervention in studies of anti-colonial nationalism, by insisting that state institutions are central to the fashioning of national identity. Massad focuses on law, the military, and education as key to understanding nationalism, and elaborates on the production not only of national identity but also of national culture including food, clothes, sports, accents, songs, and television serials.

Colonial Effects was critically praised both by several senior academics in Middle East Studies, including Edward Said who described the book as "a work of genuine brilliance," and by scholars of nationalism such as Partha Chatterjee, Amr Sabet, and Stephen Howe, the last of whom called the book "among the most sophisticated and impressive products" of recent studies in the field. The book was extensively reviewed in academic journals and, according to Betty Anderson, one of the book’s reviewers, it has become staple reading on syllabi of nationalism and Middle East politics university courses across the United States and Europe.

John Chalcraft of the University of Edinburgh described Massad's analysis of the impact of colonial subjection on modern Jordanian nationalism as "a major contribution to the literature on Jordanian nationalism, anticolonial nationalism, and the wider field of postcolonial studies;" he also criticizes the paucity of information Massad offers on how "the mass of the population [who] barely get a mention in Massad's account," fared in this history: He finds that in Massad's account "there is an impression that one, white, male, colonial subject is privileged with potency, whereas the agency of others is effaced. For the colonizer, one theory of the subject, for the colonized, another."

The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (2006)

The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, Massad's second book, was published in 2006 by Routledge.

The Persistence of the Palestinian Question analyzes Zionism and Palestinian nationalism from a variety of angles, including race, gender, culture, ethnicity, colonialism, anti-Semitism, and nationalist ideology. Massad's analysis of the discourse on terrorism in the introduction deals with the dynamics of power relations between Zionism and the Palestinians and traces the history of Zionist and Israeli violence which the British called "terrorism" in Palestine before 1948 and after, while his title chapter on the persistence of the Palestinian question argues that the Palestinian and the Jewish questions are one and the same and that "both questions can only be resolved by the negation of anti-Semitism, which still plagues much of Europe and America and which mobilizes Zionism’s own hatred of Jewish Jews and of the Palestinians."

The book has received praise from scholars Ilan Pappé and Ella Shohat as well as from Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi. Shohat praised the book as a "timely and engaging volume" that "makes an invaluable contribution to the ongoing debate over Zionism and Palestine." Pappé saw the book as a "courageous intellectual exercise" and as "a thought provoking book that forces us to reverse our conventional images and perceptions about Palestine's history and future."

Other scholars situated the book’s contribution in relation to European history and to the work of Edward Said. University of Pennsylvania political science professor Anne Norton wrote:

"Massad's brilliant and scholarly work is profoundly illuminating not only for the history of Palestine and the discourses surrounding it, but for the history of Europe and the United States and, finally, as an account that raises compelling theoretical questions."

In his review in Nations and Nationalism, Israeli scholar Ephraim Nimni wrote that "like his intellectual mentor, Massad reminds us of a long and honourable tradition of Jewish Intellectuals who could only envisage the solution to the Jewish Question through universal emancipation. It seems that Massad, and the late Edward Said, are existential Diaspora Jews of the old kind...The book is also fastidiously referenced, showing the erudition of the author and his command of the voluminous Israeli and Palestinian literature as well as the classics of Jewish history".

Desiring Arabs (2007)

Massad's third book, Desiring Arabs, was published in 2007 by the University of Chicago Press. Desiring Arabs won Columbia University's 2008 Lionel Trilling Book Award, awarded by a jury of students on the grounds that it “offers a probing study of representations of Arab sexuality" and is "an important and eloquent work of scholarship that the committee feels will have a lasting impact on the field.”

Desiring Arabs is an intellectual history of the Arab world and its Western representations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book makes interventions in a number of academic and theoretical fields. It extends Said’s study of Orientalism by analyzing the latter’s impact on Arab intellectual production; it links Orientalism to definitions and representations of sex and desire and in doing so provides a colonial archive to the sexual question that has hitherto been missing; it approaches the literary as the limits of imagining the future; and puts forth the question of translation as a central problematic in Euro-American studies of the other.

Massad argues that "Western male white-dominated" gay activists, under the umbrella of what he terms the "Gay International," have engaged in a "missionary" effort to impose the binary categories of heterosexual/homosexual into cultures where no such subjectivities exist, and that these activists in fact ultimately replicate in these cultures the very structures they challenge in their own home countries. Massad writes that "The categories gay and lesbian are not universal at all and can only be universalized by the epistemic, ethical, and political violence unleashed on the rest of the world by the very international human rights advocates whose aim is to defend the very people their intervention is creating."

Desiring Arabs has received critical praise from academics for its contributions both to the analysis of Arab culture and to the theory of sexuality.

Talal Asad, professor of Anthropology at CUNY, described it as a "remarkable book, at once a fascinating history of ideas and a brilliantly analyzed case study of cultural imperialism....[It] is quite stunning." Anton Shammas, professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Michigan, praised the book as an "elaborate, relentless, and unabashed" critique of Arab intellectual production on the question of sex and desire, "the most interesting and equally illuminating commentaries on modern Arab culture to be published in the past decade."

Feminist scholar Joan Scott, a professor of history at Princeton, describes the book as "an inspired and erudite intellectual history, complex, nuanced, critical, and deeply engaged." Scott comments that Massad refuses both an essentialized opposition between Arab and Western civilization and an all-embracing universalism offered in the name of human rights. Instead, she writes, Massad insists that representations of Arab sexuality must be understood historically, as the outcome of the encounter between Arab and Orientalist writers. In her review of the book in the Arab Studies Journal, feminist scholar Marnia Lazreg, a professor of sociology at CUNY, wrote, "This truly monumental book is a corrective to Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality that inexplicably omitted the role played by the cultural effects of colonial systems on conceptions and constructions of sexuality... [Desiring Arabs] is an epoch-making book".

Desiring Arabs has also faced criticism for its depiction of the role of Western gay organizations in the Middle East. Freelance Lebanese writer and reviewer Rayyan Al-Shawaf describes Desiring Arabs in the journal Democratiya as an "intellectual polemic" which charts the trajectory of the changing perceptions of sexuality and morality in the Arab world and the impact or Orientalism. While he agrees that Massad correctly characterizes what often appears as insensitivity shown by Western gay activists in their treatment of Arab sexuality, he feels Massad writes off any hopes for a universal freedom of sexual identity in the region. He writes that, according to Massad, "should the attempt at change be met with violence, it is the fault of 'the Gay International'", and that "in postulating the inevitability of (heterosexual) Arab violence wherever there is gay and lesbian assertiveness, Massad pre-emptively exonerates the perpetrators".

Desiring Arabs was also criticized by James Kirchick, a writer for The New Republic, who wrote that Massad "legitimizes, with a complex academic posture, the deservedly reviled views on homosexuality espoused by [Iranian President] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad," and that Desiring Arabs "might just be the most pernicious book ever published by a respectable academic press." According to Kirchick, Massad argues that "the case for gay rights in the Middle East is an elaborate scheme hatched by activists in the West," and that "Massad's intellectual project is a not-so-tacit apology for the oppression of people who identify openly as homosexual."

Massad and anti-Semitism

Following arguments made by Edward Said in his 1978 book Orientalism, Massad asserts that 19th Century European anti-Semitic characterizations of Jews have transformed in the present era to target Arabs, while maintaining the same racialist characterizations, and thus, racism towards Arabs and Muslims today is a form of "Euro-American Christian anti-Semitism and...Israeli Jewish anti-Semitism." Massad bases this belief on an understanding of anti-Semitism as a specific historical phenomenon originating in Europe, rather than simply as hatred of Jews; he writes: "...the claims made by many nowadays that any manifestation of hatred against Jews in any geographic location on Earth and in any historical period is 'anti-Semitism' smack of a gross misunderstanding of the European history of anti-Semitism."

Views on Israel, Zionism, and the U.S.

Massad has characterized Israel as "a racist Jewish state." In Massad's view, Zionism is not only racist but anti-Semitic, and anti-Semitic not only towards Arab Palestinians, but also towards Jews. Massad writes that after Europeans invented the racialist conception of the "Semite," the Zionist movement "adopted wholesale anti-Semitic ideologies", and describes Zionism as an "anti-Semitic project of destroying Jewish cultures and languages in the diaspora", which has ultimately led to "the transformation of the Jew into the anti-Semite, and the Palestinian into the Jew."

Massad has spoken of genetic links being established between 19th century European Jews and the ancient Israelite kingdom and the creation of a "semitic" identity for Jews at that time as actually a European, racist construction designed to portray European Jews as foreigners. Massad considers claims to Israel made by the Zionists movement based on that connection to be "problematic." In a debate with Israeli historian Benny Morris, Massad said

The claim made by the Zionists, and by Professor Morris, that late nineteenth-century European Jews are direct descendants of the ancient Palestinian Hebrews is what is preposterous here. This kind of anti-Semitic claim that European Jews were not European that was propagated by the racist and biological discourses on the nineteenth century, that they somehow descend from first-century Hebrews, despite the fact that they look like other Europeans, that they speak European languages, is what is absurd.

Massad argues that "U.S. imperialism" is ultimately behind Israeli actions. He has attacked the "Israel Lobby" thesis, saying, "the lobby is powerful in the United States because its major claims are about advancing US interests and its support for Israel are contextualised in its support for the overall US strategy in the Middle East."

Massad views U.S. culture as deeply infected with racism and misogyny, tying the Abner Louima case to torture in Abu Ghraib, and arguing that in Iraq, "American male sexual prowess, usually reserved for American women, [was] put to military use in imperial conquests", with "Iraqis... posited.. as women and feminised men to be penetrated by the missiles and bombs ejected from American warplanes." Massad concludes that "the content of the word 'freedom' that American politicians and propagandists want to impose on the rest of the world is nothing more and nothing less than America's violent domination, racism, torture, sexual humiliation, and the rest of it."

Massad has also criticized Arab intellectuals who "defend the racist and barbaric policies" of the United States, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the Arab world.

Massad and Columbia Unbecoming

In 2004, a pro-Israel activist organization, the David Project, produced a film, Columbia Unbecoming, interviewing students who claimed that Massad and other Columbia professors had intimidated or been unfair to them for their pro-Israel views. This eventually sparked the appointment of an Ad Hoc Grievance Committee by the university to investigate the complaints. In response to the film, New York City Councilmember Anthony Weiner called on Columbia to fire Massad for what Weiner characterized as "anti-Semitic rantings."

The Ad Hoc Grievance Committee, which concluded its work in April 2005, dismissed most of the allegations against Massad, writing in its report that it had "no basis for believing that Professor Massad systematically suppressed dissenting views in his classroom." However, the report concluded that Massad's response to one student's query in class "exceeded commonly accepted bounds by conveying that her question merited harsh public criticism."

The students who had alleged the incidents of intimidation criticized Columbia for "whitewashing" what they contended was ample evidence of anti-Semitism and intimidation of students by Massad and other members of the Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures department; Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff concurred. Some had previously complained that the committee contained members who, in their opinion, had "anti-Israel views" and personal connections to Massad.

In response to the investigation of Massad and other professors by Columbia, Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, expressed concern that the it would become an inquisition into the political views of professors, and that there was a "political agenda" motivating the complaints. Lieberman previously had met with some of the Columbia students who have made the allegations featured in Columbia Unbecoming and said in an interview that it was "wrong to accept these allegations at face value".

Massad continues to deny the allegation for which he was reprimanded by the committee. Two students beside his accuser said that they witnessed the incident, but a teaching assistant said on WNYC in April 2005 that she was present and that Massad did not angrily criticize the student in question; after the release of the report, 20 students signed a letter stating that they were in class on the day of the alleged incident, and that the incident had never happened.

In an editorial discussing the case one week after the release of the Committee report, the New York Times noted that while it believed Massad had been guilty of inappropriate behavior, it found the controversy overblown and professors such as Massad themselves victimized:

There is no evidence that anyone's grade suffered for challenging the pro-Palestinian views of any teacher or that any professors made anti-Semitic statements. The professors who were targeted have legitimate complaints themselves. Their classes were infiltrated by hecklers and surreptitious monitors, and they received hate mail and death threats.

Works

Books, and articles and book reviews published in scholarly journals. Numerous non-scholarly articles are not included.

Books

• Massad, Joseph A. (October 15, 2001). Colonial effects: the making of national identity in Jordan. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-12322-1 LCCN 20-1 – 0. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Massad, Joseph A. (2006). The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-77010-6. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Massad, Joseph A. (June 15, 2007). Desiring Arabs. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

Articles

• "Affiliating with Edward Said," forthcoming in Emancipation and Representation: On the Intellectual Meditations of Edward Said, Hakim Rustom and Adel Iskander, eds., (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
• "Beginning with Edward Said," in Belonging, The Catalog for the 7th International Biennial of Sharjah, curated by Jack Persekian and edited by Kamal Boullata, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, 2005. (Invited)
• "The Weapon of Culture: Cinema in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle," forthcoming in Hamid Dabashi, editor, Palestinian Cinema, (London: Verso, 2006).
• "The Persistence of the Palestinian Question," Cultural Critique, No. 59, Winter, 2005.
• "Liberating Songs: Palestine Put to Music," in Ted Swedenberg and Rebecca Stein, Popular Palestines: Cultures, Communities, and Transnational Circuits (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
• "The Intellectual Life of Edward Said," Journal of Palestine Studies, No. 131, Spring 2004, (pp. 7-22), (Invited).
• "The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle," Interventions, Volume 5, Number 3, 2003, (pp. 440-451).
• "The Binational State and the Reunification of the Palestinian People," Global Dialogue, Volume 4, Number 3, Summer 2002.
• "History on the Line: Joseph Massad and Benny Morris Discuss the Middle East," Debate with Israeli historian Benny Morris, History Workshop Journal, Spring 2002, (pp. 205-216).
• "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World" Public Culture, Spring, 2002, (pp. 361-385).
• "On Zionism and Jewish Supremacy," New Politics, Winter 2002, (pp. 89-101).
• "Return of Permanent Exile," in Naseer Aruri, ed., Palestinian Refugees and the Right of Return, (London: Pluto Press, 2001). This is a republication of "Return or Permanent Exile: Palestinian Refugees and the Ends of Oslo," Critique, No. 14, Spring 1999, (pp. 5-23).
• "Jordan’s Bedouins and the Military Basis of National Identity," in Cairo Papers, Essays on the Social History of the Middle East, edited and published by the American University in Cairo, Cairo, Summer 2001, (pp. 113-133).
• "Palestinians and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission?" Journal of Palestine Studies, No. 117, Fall 2000, (pp. 52-67).
• "The 'Post-Colonial' Colony, Time, Space and Bodies in Palestine/Israel," in The Pre-Occupation of Post-Colonial Studies, edited by Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Duke University Press, 2000.
• "The Politics of Desire in the Writings of Ahdaf Soueif," Journal of Palestine Studies, No. 112, Summer 1999, (pp. 74-90).
• "Return or Permanent Exile: Palestinian Refugees and the Ends of Oslo," Critique, No. 14, Spring 1999, (pp. 5-23).
• "Art and Politics in the Cinema of Youssef Chahine," Journal of Palestine Studies, No. 110, Winter 1999, (pp. 77-93).
• "Political Realists or Comprador Intelligentsia: Palestinian Intellectuals and the National Struggle," Critique, Fall, 1997 (pp. 23-35).
• "Zionism’s Internal Others: Israel and the Oriental Jews," Journal of Palestine Studies, Summer, 1996, No. 100, (pp. 53-68)
• "Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian Nationalism," Middle East Journal, Summer 1995, Vol. 49, No. 3, (pp. 467-483).
• "Repentant Terrorists, or Settler-Colonialism Revisited: The PLO-Israeli Agreement in Perspective," Found Object, Spring 1994, No. 3, (pp. 81-90), (Invited)
• "Palestinians and the Limits of Racialized Discourse," Social Text, Spring 1993, No. 34, (pp. 94-114).
• "Chansons de la liberation: La Palestine mise en musique," in Revue d'études palestiniennes, No. 87, 2003.
• "Al-Dawlah al-Thuna'iyyat al-Qawmiyyah wa I'adat Tawhid al-Sha'b al-Filastini," in Al-Adab, Nos. 7-8, July-August, 2002, 42-48.
• "'An al-Suhyuniyyah wa Naz'at al-Tafawwuq al-'Irqi al-Yahudi: min ajl 'amaliyyat salam haqiqiyyah," in Al-Adab, Nos.5-6, May-June 2002. 19-30.
• "Al-Filastiniyyun wa al-Mihraqah al-Yahudiyyah," published in Al-Muntada, Vol 16, No, 8, August 2001.
• "Sasah Waqi'iyyun Am Muthaqqafun Kumbraduriyyun, Al-Muthaqaffun Al-Filastiniyyun wa Al-Sira' Al-Watani," in Kan'an, Jerusalem, no. 85, April 1997.
• Al-Usuliyyah al-Yahudiyyah fi Isra'il, Muraja'at Kitab, Kan'an, Al-Taybah (Israel), No. 106, Summer 2001, pp. 36-41.

Book reviews

• "Deconstructing Holocaust Consciousness," a Review Essay of The Holocaust in American Life by Peter Novick and The Holocaust Industry, Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering by Norman Finkelstein and Mark Chmiel’s Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership, Journal of Palestine Studies, Autumn, 2002, (pp. 78-89)
• Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, (London: Pluto Press, 1999), Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies, MIT, no.1, 2001.
• Jordanians, Palestinians and the Hashemite Kingdom in the Middle East Peace Process by Adnan Abu-Odeh, Washington D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1999, Journal of Palestine Studies, Winter 2000, No, 118.
• Palestinian Identity , The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, by Rashid Khalidi, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Summer 2000.
• The Modern History of Jordan, by Kamal Salibi, New York: I.B. Tauris, 1998, Middle East Studies Bulletin, Summer 2000.
• Jordan and the Palestine Question, The Role of Islamic and Left Forces in Foreign Policy-Making, by Sami Al-Khazendar, London: Ithaca Press, 1997, Journal of Palestine Studies, No. 113, Fall, 1999.
• Political Islam and the New World Disorder, by Bassam Tibi, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, Middle East Journal, Volume 53, Number 3, Summer 1999.
• The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, by Joel Beinin, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, Journal of Palestine Studies, No. 111, Spring, 1999.
• The Dream Palace of the Arabs, A Generation’s Odyssey, by Fouad Ajami, New York: Pantheon Books, 1998, Al-Ahram Weekly, April 30-May 6 1998.
• Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination, Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan, by Andrew Shryock, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, Journal of Palestine Studies, No. 105, Fall, 1997.
• Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary Encounters with the Orient, by Mohammed Sharafuddin, London: I.B. Tauris, 1996, Middle East Journal, Vol. 51, No. 4, Autumn 1997.
• Image of the Prophet Muhammad in the West: A Study of Muir, Margoliouth and Watt, by Jabal Muhammad Buaben, Leicester, UK: The Islamic Foundation, 1996, Middle East Journal, Vol. 51, No. 4, Autumn 1997.
• Islam and the Myth of Confrontation, Religion and Politics in the Middle East, by Fred Halliday, London: I.B. Tauris, 1996, Journal of Palestine Studies, No. 102, Winter 1997.
• Israel’s Secret Wars, A History of Israel’s Intelligence Services by Ian Black and Benny Morris, New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1992, Middle East Insight, April, 1992.
• Republic of Fear, The Politics of Modern Iraq, by Samir al-Khalil, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, Against The Current, January 1991.