Film Forum

The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (BISR) is an interdisciplinary teaching and research institute that offers critical, community-based education in the humanities and social sciences. Working in partnership with local businesses and cultural organizations, we integrate rigorous but accessible scholarly study with the everyday lives of working adults and re-imagine scholarship for the 21st century.

Tareq Baconi is working on a book about decolonization in the 21st century. His writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Washington Post, among others. He is the author of Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford University Press, 2018) and of the short film One Like Him, a BFI-funded queer love story set in Jordan. He is the former senior analyst for Israel/Palestine and Economics of Conflict at the International Crisis Group, based in Ramallah. He serves as the president of the board of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network and the book review editor for the Journal of Palestine Studies.

Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the critically acclaimed How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (Penguin), which won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction, and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (NYU Press), which was also awarded the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. Bayoumi is also a columnist for The Guardian and a regular contributor to The Nation, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Daily Beast, CNN.com, The London Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Progressive, and other places. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He lives in Brooklyn.

Suzanne Schneider is Deputy Director and Core Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, specializing in political theory and history of the modern Middle East. She is the author of Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine and The Apocalypse and the End of History: Modern Jihad and the Crisis of Liberalism. Her writing about contemporary politics, religion, and violence has appeared in The New Republic, Mother Jones, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, n+1, and Aeon among other outlets. She is currently working on a new book about the use of risk as a social and political tool.

Mariam Said was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, and currently resides in New York City. Together with Daniel Barenboim, she is a major force behind the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and serves as the Vice-President of the Barenboim-Said Foundation (USA) and Barenboim-Said Center for Music, Ramallah. Mariam Said holds an undergraduate degree from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in Lebanon and two graduate degrees from Columbia University. She worked for more than 20 years in the financial services industry in New York.

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