Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists, a documentary film by Director Bruce Robbins about American Jews who take an independent line on Israel and the Middle East.

The heart of the film focuses on the experiences of American Jews changing their minds on Palestine/Israel: what they were told about Israel and their Jewish identity as they were growing up, what they went through as they began gaining a different perspective, and finally what Israel and Jewish identity mean to them now.

Following the screening, there will be a discussion with the Director.

This talk is a discussion of contemporary Palestinian art practices and an analysis of how artworks, especially those depicting bodies or their absence, reveal and reform ideas about the individual, community, locality, and aesthetic belonging since the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Kirsten Scheid is an associate professor of anthropology at the American University of Beirut. She specializes in modern and contemporary Arab art. Scheid completed a book on the modern art movement in Lebanon titled On Civilized Art in Primitive Places: Modern Art and the Formation of Lebanon. The talk arises from comparative ethnographic research she is currently conducting on Palestinian and Lebanese art production since the "New Middle East" was initiated in the early 1990s.