Joseph Massad

Massad has spoken of genetic links being established between 19th-century European Jews and the ancient Israelite kingdom and the creation of a "semitic" identity for Jews at that time as actually a European, racist construction designed to portray European Jews as foreigners. Massad considers claims to Israel made by the Zionists movement based on that connection to be "problematic." In a debate with Israeli historian Benny Morris, Massad said:

Islam in Liberalism is Joseph Massad's fourth book, published by University of Chicago Press in 2015. A review in the Los Angeles Review of Books states that the thesis of the book is that "American and European missionaries of liberalism are trying to proselytize Muslims — and the entire world writ large — to the only sane system of values that exists on the planet: those of Western liberalism". The book deals with the "instrumentalization of Islam in the West" and responds to critiques of his earlier book Desiring Arabs.

Massad's relativism – stemming from his accurate observation that 'homosexuality' is alien to Arab same-gender sexual traditions – is so extreme that he refuses to support a call for universal freedom of sexual identity.

In postulating the inevitability of (heterosexual) Arab violence wherever there is gay and lesbian assertiveness, Massad pre-emptively exonerates the perpetrators – whether individuals or the state – of any wrongdoing. However regrettable their behaviour, those Arabs who react violently to the gay rights campaign are not perceived by Massad as responsible for their actions, but as caught up in a broader struggle against 'imperialism', to which the gay rights movement is wedded.

Massad's third book, Desiring Arabs, was published in 2007 by the University of Chicago Press. Desiring Arabs won Columbia University's 2008 Lionel Trilling Book Award, awarded by a jury of students on the grounds that it "offers a probing study of representations of Arab sexuality" and is "an important and eloquent work of scholarship that the committee feels will have a lasting impact on the field."

The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, Massad's second book, was published in 2006 by Routledge.

The Ad Hoc Grievance Committee, which concluded its work in April 2005, dismissed most of the allegations against Massad, writing in its report that it had "no basis for believing that Professor Massad systematically suppressed dissenting views in his classroom." and stated that they "found no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-semitic." The committee found it credible that Massad was angered by a question in class from a student that he understood to be defending Israel's conduct toward Palestinians and that his response "exceeded commonly accepted bounds by conveying that her question merited harsh public criticism", but it also described an environment of incivility, with pro-Israel students disrupting lectures on Middle Eastern studies.

Massad continues to deny the one allegation that the report found "credible." Two students beside his accuser said that they witnessed the incident, but a teaching assistant said on WNYC in April 2005 that she was present and that Massad did not angrily criticize the student in question; after the release of the report, 20 students signed a letter stating that they were in class on the day of the alleged incident, and that the incident had never happened.

In 2004, a pro-Israel activist organization, the David Project, produced a film, Columbia Unbecoming, interviewing students who claimed that Massad and other Columbia professors had intimidated or been unfair to them for their pro-Israel views. This eventually sparked the appointment of an Ad Hoc Grievance Committee by the university to investigate the complaints. In response to the film, United States Representative Anthony Weiner called on Columbia to fire Massad for what Weiner characterized as "anti-Semitic rantings."

Massad's first book, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan, was published in 2001 by Columbia University Press. The book is based on Massad's PhD dissertation, which won the Middle East Studies Association Malcolm Kerr Dissertation Award in 1998.

Following arguments made by Edward Said in his 1978 book Orientalism, Massad asserts that 19th Century European antisemitic characterizations of Jews have transformed in the present era to target Arabs, while maintaining the same racialist characterizations, and thus, racism towards Arabs and Muslims today is a form of "Euro-American Christian anti-Semitism and ... Israeli Jewish anti-Semitism." Massad bases this belief on an understanding of antisemitism as a specific historical phenomenon originating in Europe, rather than simply as hatred of Jews; he writes: "... the claims made by many nowadays that any manifestation of hatred against Jews in any geographic location on Earth and in any historical period is 'anti-Semitism' smack of a gross misunderstanding of the European history of anti-Semitism."

Joseph Andoni Massad (Arabic: جوزيف مسعد ‎; born 1963) is Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, whose academic work has focused on Palestinian, Jordanian, and Israeli nationalism. He is also known for his book Desiring Arabs, about representations of sexual desire in the Arab world.

Massad was born in Jordan in 1963, and is of Palestinian Christian descent,. He received his PhD in Political Science from Columbia in 1998.

The Persistence of the Palestinian Question analyzes Zionism and Palestinian nationalism from a variety of angles, including race, gender, culture, ethnicity, colonialism, antisemitism, and nationalist ideology. Massad's analysis of the discourse on terrorism in the introduction deals with the dynamics of power relations between Zionism and the Palestinians and traces the history of Zionist and Israeli violence which the British called "terrorism" in Palestine before 1948 and after, while his title chapter on the persistence of the Palestinian question argues that the Palestinian and the Jewish questions are one and the same and that "both questions can only be resolved by the negation of anti-Semitism, which still plagues much of Europe and America and which mobilizes Zionism's own hatred of Jewish Jews and of the Palestinians."

Over the course of a detailed history of the Jordanian state, from its inception in 1921 to 2000, he argues that state institutions are central to the fashioning of national identity. Massad focuses on institutions of law, the military, and education as key components of nationalism, and elaborates on the production not only of national identity but also of national culture including food, clothes, sports, accents, songs, and television serials.