Join Hilary Falb Kalisman, Endowed Professor of Israel/Palestine Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, for a conversation with Ahmed Mansour, the director of Brooklyn Inshallah, and Dan Chyutin, a director and scholar of Israeli film, on the relationship between the United States, Israel, and Palestine, as well as Israeli and Palestinian film. Two documentaries – Brooklyn Inshallah (2019), covering the candidacy of a pastor from Palestine attempting to become the first Arab American to win a seat in the New York City Council, and ‘Til Kingdom Come (2020), exploring the relationship between American evangelicals and Israeli politics – will be made available for streaming, free of charge, during the two weeks before the event; details will be sent upon registering. Viewing one or both of the documentaries before the October 18 conversation is encouraged, but not required.

Ahmed Mansour, a New York-based filmmaker, is a NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute - News and Documentary Program - graduate. Ahmed was born and raised in a refugee camp in Gaza Strip, Palestine. He worked as an organizer, translator, and guide for international journalists covering the 2014 war. He made a series of short films highlighting the humanitarian crisis in Gaza Strip after three successive wars. He has also worked as a reporter for the Washington Report on the Middle East Affairs in Washington DC. He runs his own production company specializing in short videos, and is skilled in all aspects of filmmaking. He is a graduate of an extensive course in storytelling form Storywise Center. Ahmed has received residencies and fellowships from Duke University and the Paths to Peace Leadership Program.

Dan Chyutin graduated from Tel Aviv University’s Film and Television Department (BFA) and New York University’s Cinema Studies Department (MA), earning a PhD in Critical Cultural Studies and Film from the University of Pittsburgh. His academic work has been awarded grants by, amongst others, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Israel Institute, and the International Association for Media and History. He has essays published or forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, and is the co-editor (with Rachel S. Harris) of Casting a Giant Shadow: The Transnational Shaping of Israeli Cinema (Indiana University Press, 2021). Dan served as Artistic Director of the EU-funded initiative “Another Look: The Restored European Film Project” (2013-2017), and also offered curatorial support to the Pittsburgh Jewish Israeli Film Festival, New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, and the French Institute-Israel (Tel Aviv). He is also an avid photographer and trained filmmaker, whose short subject fiction and experimental films have been screened in various venues worldwide, including the Zebra Poetry Film Festival (Berlin), Tirana International Film Festival, Brooklyn International Film Festival, ARTFilm Slovakia, Invideo Milan, and the International Festival of Short Films on Culture (Jaipur, India).

Hilary Falb Kalisman holds a B.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley. Her research interests include education, colonialism, and state and nation building in Israel/Palestine as well as in the broader Middle East. Her forthcoming book, Teachers as State Builders: Educators and the Making of of the Modern Middle East, uses a collective biography of thousands of public school teachers across Israel/Palestine, Iraq and Transjordan/Jordan to trace how the arc of teachers’ professionalization correlated with their political activity, while undermining correspondence between nations, nationalism, and governments across the region. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Academy of Education, the American Academic Institute in Iraq as well as the International Institute of Education, among other organizations. She has recently begun a new project analyzing the history of standardized testing in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq. For the 2019-2020 academic year, she was also a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Initiative, part of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School. Her teaching comprises Jewish and Middle Eastern History, with specializations in the history of Israel/Palestine, as well as the history of childhood.