New Books In Education

AD KAN (NO MORE) was founded in 1988 by a group of academics at Tel Aviv University. The initiative, a public pressure group, was prompted by public indifference (at best) about Israel’s 20-year occupation of the Palestinian Territories, and its forceful attempts to suppress the nascent First Intifada popular uprising in the West Bank. Whilst outward facing in their basic ambitions, the founder members of AD KAN also understood that academia’s failure to engage with the realities of the moment—through debate, protest, even applied research—could easily be taken too as acceptance of the status quo, embodying as it did the subaltern position of the Palestinian people. Can Academics Change the World? An Israeli Anthropologist’s Testimony on the Rise and Fall of a Protest Movement on Campus (Berghahn Books, 2020) by Moshe Shokeid, is a personal account of the author’s experiences as co-founder of AD KAN. An account of dissent on campus, the book is at once a memoir, a historical account, and an anthropological co