Scholars@Duke
Rebecca L. Stein

Rebecca L. Stein

Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Cultural Anthropology
rlstein@duke.edu
Box 90091, Durham, NC 27708-0091
205 Friedl Building, 1316 Campus Drive Duke Box 900, Durham, NC 27710

Selected Publications

The Anthropology of Religion, Magic, and Witchcraft

Book · January 1, 2024 This concise and accessible textbook introduces students to the anthropological study of religion. It examines religious expression from a cross-cultural perspective and exposes students to the complexities of religion in small-scale and complex societies. ... Full text Cite

The visual terms of state violence in Israel/Palestine: An interview with Rebecca L. Stein

Journal Article Philosophy of Photography · April 1, 2023 This interview with media anthropologist, Rebecca L. Stein, conducted by Noa Levin and Andrew Fisher in Spring 2023, takes her recent book Screenshots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine (2021) as its starti ... Full text Open Access Cite

How to Unsee Gaza: Israeli Media, State Violence, Palestinian Testimony

Chapter · 2023 This essay studies the way that the traditional Israeli news media reported the Gaza war of 2008-2009 to their Jewish-Israeli target audience. My analysis pays particular attention to what the traditional Israeli media withheld from Jewish Israeli consumin ... Cite

The Visual Terms of State Violence in Israel/Palestine: Interview with Rebecca L. Stein

Journal Article Philosophy of Photography · 2023 This interview with media anthropologist, Rebecca L. Stein, conducted by Noa Levin and Andrew Fisher, takes her recent book Screenshots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine (2021) as its starting point in order to explore issues of state viole ... Cite

"Hoax!" Palestinian Cameras, Israeli state violence, and the "Fake News" fantasy

Chapter · January 1, 2022 This essay focuses on the right-wing Israeli reckoning with the visual archive of Palestinian injury at Israeli state or settler hands-a reckoning that occurs through the discourse of "fake news," or the charge that such images are fraudulent or manipulate ... Full text Cite

The Boy Who Wasn't Really Killed: Israeli State Violence in the Age of the Smartphone Witness

Journal Article International Journal of Middle East Studies · November 1, 2021 Over the course of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, within the occupied Palestinian territories, photographic technologies and image-oriented politics would grow increasingly central as activist and human-rights tools of bearing witness t ... Full text Cite

Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine

Book · June 2021 In the last two decades, amid the global spread of smartphones, state killings of civilians have increasingly been captured on the cameras of both bystanders and police. Screen Shots studies this phenomenon from the vantage point of the Israeli occupation ... Link to item Cite

How One Palestinian University is Remaking ‘Israel Studies’

Journal Article Middle East Report · May 16, 2019 Link to item Cite

"Fake News!" The View from Israel's Occupation

Journal Article OpenDemocracy · February 2018 Link to item Cite

GoPro occupation: Networked cameras, Israeli Military rule, and the digital promise

Journal Article Current Anthropology · February 1, 2017 This paper is an ethnographical exploration of the growing importance of photographic technologies within the contemporary political theater of Israel’s military occupation studied from the vantage of Israeli actors and institutions. My ethnography focuses ... Full text Cite

“Israel Dispatch"

Other Middle East Report · 2017 Among the numerous ideological affinities and governing styles shared by President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a commitment to the rhetoric of “fake news.” In the last year, Netanyahu has increasingly borrowed this Trumpian formu ... Link to item Cite

Dispossession Reconsidered: Israel, Nakba, Things

Journal Article Ethnologie Francaise · January 1, 2015 This paper considers the ways that differently situated communities of Israeli Jews have contended with the history of the Palestinian dispossession of 1948.1949 war. The analysis focuses on the ways this history is to formerly Palestinian things and propo ... Full text Cite

Performative zion: Butler’s parting ways

Journal Article Studies in American Jewish Literature · July 6, 2014 Full text Cite

Performative Zion: Butler's Parting Ways

Journal Article Studies in American Jewish Literature · 2014 Full text Link to item Cite

Selfie Militarism

Journal Article London Review of Books · 2014 Cite

State Tube: Anthropological reflections on social media and the Israeli State

Journal Article Anthropological Quarterly · September 12, 2012 Full text Open Access Cite

Impossible Witness: Israeli Visuality, Palestinian Testimony, and the Gaza War

Journal Article Journal for Cultural Research (special issue on Arab Cultural Studies) · 2012 Open Access Cite

An All-Consuming Occupation

Other Middle East Report · 2012 Link to item Cite

The Other Wall: Facebook and Israel

Other London Review of Books blog · April 19, 2011 Link to item Cite

Bin Laden’s TV

Other Jadaliyya · 2011 Link to item Cite

Tours that Bind: Review of Shaul Kelner

Other Journal of Tourism History · 2011 Cite

Tours that Bind: Review of Shaul Kelner

Other Journal of Tourism History · 2011 Cite

Digital Suspicion, Politics, and the Middle East

Journal Article Critical Inquiry (online feature on Arab Spring) · 2011 Open Access Link to item Cite

EXPLOSIVE

Journal Article GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies · October 1, 2010 This essay examines two works by the Israeli director Eytan Fox—Florentin, a television serial, and The Bubble, a feature film—and the highly divergent ways they negotiate the interplay between queerness, the Israeli state, and the Israeli military ... Full text Open Access Cite

TRAVELLING ZION Hiking and Settler-Nationalism in pre-1948 Palestine

Journal Article INTERVENTIONS-INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES · 2009 Full text Open Access Cite

Souvenirs of conquest: Israeli occupations as tourist events

Journal Article International Journal of Middle East Studies · October 31, 2008 It is perhaps self-evident to suggest that military conquest shares something with tourism because both involve encounters with "strange" landscapes and people. Thus it may not surprise that the former sometimes borrows rhetorical strategies from the latte ... Full text Open Access Cite

Review of Shared histories: A Palestinian-Israeli dialogue by Paul Scham, et al

Other INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST STUDIES · February 2008 Link to item Cite

Review of Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices by Ella Shohat

Other International Journal of Middle East Studies · 2007 Cite

Shared Histories

Other International Journal of Middle East Studies · 2007 Cite

TABOO MEMORIES, DIASPORIC VOICES

Other International Journal of Middle East Studies · 2007 Cite

Review of Israeli backpackers: From tourism to rite of passage

Other INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST STUDIES · November 2006 Full text Link to item Cite

Daniel Lefkowitz, WORDS AND STONES

Journal Article American Anthropologist · 2006 Cite

WORDS AND STONES

Other American Anthropologist · 2006 Cite

Israeli Backpackers: From Tourism to Rite of Passage

Other International Journal of Middle East Studies · 2006 Cite

Popular Culture, Relational History, and the Question of Power in Palestine and Israel

Journal Article Journal of Palestine Studies · 2004 The marginalization of popular culture in radical scholarship on Palestine and Israel is symptomatic of the conceptual limits that still define much Middle East studies scholarship: namely, the prevailing logic of the nation-state on the one hand and the a ... Full text Link to item Cite

Israel und die kulturelle Politik des Tourisms

Other Sommer Akademie News · August 2003 Cite

Pappé Faces down Prosecution

Other Middle East Report · 2002 Full text Link to item Cite

Zionism's Internal Critics

Other Journal of Palestine Studies · 2002 Cite

Israeli Interiors: Ethnic Tourism, The State, and the Politics of Space

Journal Article European University Institute Working Papers · 2001 Cite

Review of Our Sisters’ Promised Land by Ayala Emmet

Other American Anthropologist · 1998 Cite

From Shmaltz to Sacrilege: Commemorating Israel After Rabin

Other Middle East report (New York, N.Y.) · 1998 Cite

Our Sisters' Promised Land, Ayala Emmet

Other American Anthropologist · 1998 Cite

Review of Political Tourism in Palestine

Other Stanford Humanities Review · 1995 Cite

Political Tourism in Palestine

Other Stanford Humanities Review · 1995 Cite

The Limits of the Revisionist Imagination

Other Middle East report (New York, N.Y.) · 1995 Cite

Military Closure in Gaza, 1992

Other Challenge · 1993 Cite

Military Closure in Gaza, 1992

Journal Article Challenge · 1993 Cite

The New Infiltrators: Defying Military Closure

Journal Article Challenge · 1992 Cite

Review of Zealots for Zion by Robert Friedman

Other Middle East Report · 1991 Cite

Zealots for Zion, Robert Friedman

Other Middle East report (New York, N.Y.) · 1991 Cite

“The Rise of the Militarized Selfie"

Other Association of Jewish Studies Perspectives Cite

“Hoax!” Palestinian Digitality and Israeli Anxiety in the Occupied West Bank

Chapter This essay focuses on the right-wing Israeli reckoning with the visual archive of Palestinian injury at Israeli state or settler hands – a reckoning that occurs through the discourse of “fake news,” or the charge that such images are fraudulent or manipula ... Cite