Join scholar and activist Emmaia Gelman for a conversation about Zionism as a “movement from above” — an elite project of racial state-making in alignment with U.S. imperialism. Through the lens of her deep research into the Anti-Defamation League, she will show how race, class, and state power flow through the brokerage of elite institutions that weaponize civil rights discourse and tradition. The conversation will sharpen our analysis and inform our organizing as we resist these forms of elite capture and the violences they protect.

Emmaia Gelman is the author of The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State and co-editor of The Anti-Defamation League: A Critical Reader. She is the founding director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, co-chair of the American Studies Association Caucus on Academic and Community Activism, the co-host of the podcast Unpacking Zionism, and a longtime activist in New York City. Her writing has appeared in Boston Review, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Jadaliyya, Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism, Jewish Currents, Truthout, Mondoweiss, and others.

Emmaia will be in conversation with Conor Q. Foley, Director of Community Engagement at the Community Church and author of The Bible and Police Violence in the United States, published by Routledge in May 2026.

RSVP: ccny.org/conversations