The 21st annual Maryse & Ramzy Mikhail Memorial Lecture was held Sunday, October 10, 2021 at 3:00 p.m., featuring human rights attorney and scholar Noura Erakat. The event, which was free and open to the public, was held at the University of Toledo, at the law school’s McQuade Law Auditorium. The lecture, titled, “We Broke a Dam: The Palestinian Intifada of Unity,” also is available to view online at this link.
Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an Associate Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick in the Department of Africana Studies and the Program in Criminal Justice. Her research interests include humanitarian law, refugee law, national security law, and critical race theory. Noura is the author of Justice for Some: Law As Politics in the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), winner of the 2019 Palestine Book Awards sponsored by the Middle East Monitor and winner of the Independent Publishers Book Award’s Bronze Medal in Current Events/Foreign Affairs. She is a Co-Founding Editor of Jadaliyya e-zine and an Editorial Committee member of the Journal of Palestine Studies.
She has served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, as a Legal Advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights, and as the national grassroots organizer and legal advocate at the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. Noura is the co-editor of Aborted State? The UN Initiative and New Palestinian Junctures, an anthology related to the 2011and 2012 Palestine bids for statehood at the UN. More recently, Noura released a pedagogical project on the Gaza Strip and Palestine, which includes a short multimedia documentary, “Gaza In Context,” that rehabilitates Israel’s wars on Gaza within a settler-colonial framework. She is also the producer of the short video, “Black Palestinian Solidarity.” She is a frequent commentator, with recent appearances on CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NPR, among others, and her writings have been widely published in the national media and academic journals. She is currently a Non-Resident Visiting Fellow in the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at the Religious Literacy Project at the Harvard Divinity School.
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The Mikhail Endowment Fund was originally established through a donation from the Mikhail family to honor the work and contributions of Maryse Mikhail and her involvement in educational, philanthropic and interfaith organizations. The main purpose of the fund is to support an annual lecture dealing with Arab culture, history, politics, economics, and other aspects of life in the Middle East including issues of peace and justice. The Mikhail Lecture is the longest running endowed lecture series at the University of Toledo.
Maryse and Ramzy Mikhail Memorial Lecture 