Joel Beinin

Joel has been engaged with Israel/Palestine and the broader Middle East since he was a teenager. He spent six months in Israel after graduating high school and a summer in Cairo studying Arabic between his junior and senior years in college. In the early 1970s he lived on a kibbutz in the northern Negev/Naqab and in Jerusalem, where he was a graduate student at the Hebrew University. In Jerusalem he was active in the student-based Israeli New Left (Siach) and experienced a political reawakening while participating in the opposition to the first stages of Israel’s settlement project in the occupied Palestinian territories and supporting the Mizrahi Israeli Black Panther movement.

After returning to the United States, he used his Arabic language skills as a political activist in the Arab community of Dearborn Michigan while working on the line at Chrysler’s Warren Stamping Plant.

After many detours through which he learned a few things that were not on any syllabus at Princeton and Harvard (where he received his BA and MA respectively), he enrolled in the PhD program in Middle East history at the University of Michigan. During his studies, he worked with Palestinians, Israelis, and others in the Palestine Human Rights Campaign and the movement opposing Israel’s 1982 war on Lebanon. His doctoral research took him to live in Egypt for a year. He subsequently returned for research and extended residences in Egypt and Israel/Palestine and traveled extensively throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

After receiving his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1982, he moved with his family to California and Stanford University, where he taught from 1983 to 2019, with a two-year hiatus as Director of Middle East Studies at the American University in Cairo.

Alongside his academic career, Joel has engaged in critical research and advocacy beyond the academy. For many years he was a member of the editorial committee of the Middle East Research and Information Project, which provides critical reporting and analysis of state power, political economy, social hierarchies, and popular struggles in the Middle East and US policy in the region. More recently, he is a non-resident fellow of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), an American non-profit organization that advocates for democracy and human rights in the Arab world.

Joel’s longing for an urban environment and desire to be closer to his son and granddaughter led him to move with his partner to Portland, OR after retiring from Stanford. The extended police riot in the summer of 2020, the high point of the Black Lives Matter protests, highlighted the extent to which historic and contemporary racism structure “liberal” Portland, which he hadn’t previously fully appreciated. Still, on a clear day he can see Mt. Hood from his living room window.

Joel is now the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus at Stanford University. His research and teaching have been focused on the history and political economy of modern Egypt, Palestine, and Israel, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He has written or edited twelve books. In 2001-02 he served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.