October 7: The Wars Over Words and Deeds

October 7 The Wars Over Words and Deeds cast a destructive shadow not only over the men, women, and children caught on the battlefields of Gaza but also over the educators and journalists expected to explain why and how it happened. Despite its brutality, Hamas won substantial support on campuses, in the media, and from an array of progressive movements. The Hamas attacks, astonishing in their ambition, can only be fully understood by examining the world’s responses to them, and telling the full story of October 7 requires data-driven and textual analysis. This is a rare combination, but one that makes this volume distinctive and essential for all those who want to understand how such a nightmare both reflects our twenty-first-century world and permanently changes it. 

“This ambitious collection tackles a controversial topic, and it does so boldly and thoroughly. The essays provide a rich variety of views, diverse in focus, methodology, and findings. There are scholars of gender here, as well as military strategists, but also those who study terrorism, domestic politics, and antisemitism. There are humanities and social science scholars, quantitative and qualitative. An important, ambitious, and provocative read!” 

—Ron Hassner, Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies, University of California, Berkeley