Joseph Andoni Massad (; born 1963) is a Jordanian academic specializing in Middle Eastern studies, who is Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University in New York. His academic work has focused on Palestine, Zionism, Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, and nationalism, identity, culture, and sexuality in the Arab world.
Massad was born in Jordan in 1963 and is of Palestinian Christian descent. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in 1998. He is known for his books The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians and Desiring Arabs, about representations of sexual desire in the Arab world.
Biography
Early life Massad was born in Jordan in 1963 to parents who were forcibly displaced with their families from Jaffa, Mandatory Palestine during the 1948 Palestine war. His parents met in Beirut, when his mother was living in the Mousaitbeh neighborhood. His father—passionate about foreign languages and conversant in Italian, French, and English in addition to Arabic—found employment at the British embassy in Amman. His mother worked for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for some time and was an avid reader.
Education
College De La Salle Frères Joseph studied at the College De La Salle Frères, a Catholic school in Amman operated by the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, where he studied alongside Muslims and other Christians. His father had studied at their school in Jaffa.
University of New Mexico In 1981, he moved the United States to pursue his studies at the University of New Mexico, where he earned a BA and an MA. He began a course of study in engineering. He then decided to pursue political science, a decision he attributes to the politicization he experienced, citing the impact of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, as well as his culture shock as an Arab international student in New Mexico, on his political thinking. Among the books he read around the age of 19 were David Hirst's 1977 book The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East and Edward Said's 1979 book The Palestinian Question. He specialized in Latin America.
Columbia University In 1991, he started his doctoral studies at Columbia, where he studied political science, specializing in the Middle East. Massad was profoundly influenced by Edward Said, whom Massad would later consider a mentor and friend. They were in different departments at Columbia—Massad in political science and Said in comparative literature—but Massad enrolled in two courses taught by Said: Culture and Imperialism and Representations of the Intellectual. In 1998, he received his doctorate in political science from Columbia University, and in the fall of 1999 he started teaching as an adjunct professor at the same institution.
Career Massad has stated that he began facing political pressure as an adjunct professor at Columbia in 2001, with a campaign started by a few students, According to Massad, this pressure intensified from 2002 following articles critical of his views on US foreign policy in the Middle East and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict published in right-wing Zionist publications and tabloids in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Following the screenings of The David Project's film Columbia Unbecoming in 2004, there were public calls for his termination from figures such as Anthony Weiner. The Ad Hoc Grievance Committee Report presented to Columbia President Lee Bollinger found "no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic" and "no basis for believing that Professor Massad systematically suppressed dissenting views in his classroom." Instead, it found that Massad had been the target of harassment from pro-Israel students and that outside organizations had attempted to spy on professors. It found one instance of alleged classroom intimidation from Massad to be "credible," one in which a student recalled asking about Israel sometimes giving a warning before a bombing to minimize casualties, after which the student said the professor said, "If you're going to deny the atrocities being committed against Palestinians, then you can get out of my classroom!"
In the summer of 2009, Massad earned tenure at the university. In June, the New York Post published an op-ed by Jacob Gershman, formerly of the New York Sun, which announced and condemned Massad's tenure. It was also denounced by LionPAC, a pro-Israel student advocacy group at Columbia. In a July 2009 letter to the provost, Claude Steele, 14 professors protested Massad's tenure, citing details that had been published in Gershman's op-ed in the New York Post.
In 2011, attorney Kenneth L. Marcus filed a complaint against Columbia citing Massad with the US Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), where Marcus previously worked. The complaint was pursuant to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In response to the complaint, Bollinger said, "the individual complaint appears to relate to academic advising at Barnard College and in no way involves Professor Joseph Massad," and "based on these facts, therefore, it is extremely unfair for professor Massad to be cited in a matter in which he played no part whatsoever." The OCR dismissed the complaint in January 2012.
During the Gaza war On 8 October 2023, Massad's piece "Just another battle or the Palestinian war of liberation?" was published in The Electronic Intifada. A petition by a student calling for the "immediate removal of Joseph Massad from Columbia's faculty"—which specifically criticized Massad's use of the words "astonishing," "astounding," and "awesome" in the article, claiming it showed "support for the terrorist organization"—quickly gained attention after it was shared by former US ambassador to Israel David M. Friedman on X, formerly Twitter. Amid the ensuing campaign against Massad, which included death threats including one Massad said was slid under his office door, hundreds of Columbia affiliates signed an October 15 letter calling on Columbia President Minouche Shafik to "unequivocally guarantee his physical safety and his academic freedom as well as those of our University’s faculty and students more broadly." On October 19, Eve M. Troutt Powell, historian and president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), and Laurie Brand, chair of MESA's Committee on Academic Freedom, wrote a letter to Shafik expressing concern over the university's failure to defend Massad.
On 17 April 2024, amid campus protests during the Gaza war and the start of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, the US House Committee on Education and Workforce held a hearing on antisemitism in which US congressmen and congresswomen questioned a panel of Columbia leaders, including Minouche Shafik, university president (2023–2024); David Greenwald and Claire Shipman, co-chairs of the Trustees of Columbia University; and David Schizer, a co-chair of Columbia's Task Force on Antisemitism. Representative Tim Walberg (R-MI) focused on Massad and asked Shipman and Greenwald whether they would hypothetically approve tenure for Massad at that moment if they were on the faculty committee that decided tenure. When they said they would not, Walberg retorted " Then why is he still in the classroom?" Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR) returned to the topic of Massad and asked again why he had not been fired. Shafik said that there were certain situations in which tenured professors could be fired and noted that Massad’s conduct was still under investigation. Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) also returned to the topic of Massad and asked Shafik to clarify whether Massad was chair of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences academic review committee at the time and asked Shafik if she would make the commitment to remove him from the chair. Shafik said he was under investigation and acquiesced to Stefanik.
In an email to The New York Times, Massad accused Walberg of distorting his writing and said it was "news to me" that he was under investigation. In response to Columbia's testimony, Irene Mulvey, national president of the American Association of University Professors, said "President Shafik threw academic freedom and Columbia University faculty under the bus." The Electronic Intifada published a statement from Massad in which he wrote:The members of Congress who interrogated President Shafik deliberately misrepresented my article published on 8 October 2023, when Representative Walberg claimed that I "prais[ed] ‘the innovative Palestinian resistance,’ for attacking Israel and glorifying Hamas’s slaughter of nearly 1200 Jews as, and I quote again, 'awesome, astonishing, astounding and incredible.'" I certainly said nothing of the sort.
Colonial Effects (2001) Massad's first book, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan, was published in 2001 by Columbia University Press. The book is based on Massad's PhD dissertation, which won the Middle East Studies Association Malcolm Kerr Dissertation Award in 1998.
Over the course of a detailed history of the Jordanian state, from its inception in 1921 to 2000, he argues that state institutions are central to the fashioning of national identity. Massad focuses on institutions of law, the military, and education as key components of nationalism, and elaborates on the production not only of national identity but also of national culture including food, clothes, sports, accents, songs, and television serials.
Colonial Effects was critically praised both by several senior academics in Middle East Studies, including Edward Said who described the book as "a work of genuine brilliance," and by scholars of nationalism such as Partha Chatterjee, Amr Sabet, and Stephen Howe, the last of whom called the book "among the most sophisticated and impressive products" of recent studies in the field. The book was extensively reviewed in academic journals and, according to Betty Anderson, one of the book's reviewers, it has become staple reading on syllabi of nationalism and Middle East politics university courses across the United States and Europe.
John Chalcraft of the University of Edinburgh described Massad's analysis of the impact of colonial subjection on modern Jordanian nationalism as "a major contribution to the literature on Jordanian nationalism, anticolonial nationalism, and the wider field of postcolonial studies;" he also criticizes the paucity of information Massad offers on how "the mass of the population [who] barely get a mention in Massad's account," fared in this history: he finds that in Massad's account "there is an impression that one, white, male, colonial subject is privileged with potency, whereas the agency of others is effaced. For the colonizer, one theory of the subject, for the colonized, another."
The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (2006) The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, Massad's second book, was published in 2006 by Routledge.