Seth Anziska is the Mohamed S. Farsi-Polonsky Lecturer in Jewish-Muslim Relations at UCL. His research and teaching focuses on Israeli and Palestinian society and culture, modern Middle Eastern history, and contemporary Arab and Jewish politics. He is the author of Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo (Princeton University Press, 2018), and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and The New York Review of Books. Seth received his PhD in International and Global History from Columbia University, his M. Phil. in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and his BA in history from Columbia University. He is a 2018-2019 Fulbright Scholar at the Norwegian Nobel Institute, and has held visiting positions at Dartmouth College, New York University, the London School of Economics, and the American University of Beirut.
Our Voice of the Fortnight is from the Times of Israel's 'Wartime Diaries' podcast. In the immediate aftermath of October 7th, Shai Davidai – an Assistant Professor at Columbia University – became an unlikely public defender of Israel. And truthfully, even he was surprised by this turn of events: As a committed left-wing Israeli, he had spent years criticizing the government, and often took to the streets to demonstrate against its policies. But the atmosphere he witnessed on college campuses (and specifically on his own campus at Columbia), compelled him to speak up and speak out.