“Knowledge for the Sake of Knowledge” or “Knowledge for the Cause”:  Jonathan Gribetz and Peter Cole in Conversation

Join YPSA Scholar in Residence Jonathan Gribetz (Princeton University) and Peter Cole (Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies) for a discussion about Gribetz’s Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy (2024). The two scholars will discuss the book with a focus on how the PLO Research Center navigated the tension between serious knowledge production and effective political advocacy. Jonathan Gribetz, Princeton University Jonathan Gribetz is a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and in the Program in Judaic Studies and the director of the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia (TRI) at Princeton University. Gribetz’s second book, Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy, analyzed the history of the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center and its studies of Jews, Judaism, Zionism, and Israel. His first book, Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter, investigated the mutual perceptions of Zionists and Arabs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing the prominent place of religious and racial categories in the ways in which these communities imagined and related to one another. Peter Cole, Yale University Poet and translator Peter Cole has been affiliated with Yale since 2006 and currently teaches classes each spring in the Comparative Literature Department and the Jewish Studies Program. He is the author of six books of poems, and many volumes of translation from Hebrew and Arabic. He also serves as co-editor of Princeton University Press’s Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation. This event is limited to Yale students, faculty, and staff. Please register here Made possible by a generous gift from the Benjamin Zucker Family Fund.