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At a time when attempts at historical erasure are at a fever pitch, we take a moment to step back and consider the role that drama, writing, and art can play in keeping history alive. When we remember, we resist erasure and memory becomes an act of resistance. We're honored to join Under the Tree Podcast in welcoming Ismail Khalidi and Rashid Khalidi to the store for a conversation on history, drama, and acts of resistance.

This is event is cosponsored by:

UIC Arab American Cultural Center
UIC Global Middle East Studies
Uprising Theater & Cafe
Latinxs for Palestine
Silk Road Cultural Center

Ismail Khalidi is a playwright and director. His plays include Tennis in Nablus (Alliance Theatre), Truth Serum Blues (Pangea World Theater), Foot (Teatro Amal), Sabra Falling (Pangea World Theater), Dead Are My People (Noor Theatre), Guernica, Gaza (Ashtar Theatre) and The Magic Bullet (Lub Dub). He has adapted two novels for the stage with Naomi Wallace: Ghassan Knafani’s Returning to Haifa (Finborough Theatre) and Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer (Actors Theatre of Louisville). His most recent collaboration with Wallace, Guernica, Gaza: Visions from the Center of the Earth, premiered at Ashtar Theater in Palestine in 2024. Khalidi’s plays have been published in numerous anthologies, including the collection from Bloomsbury (2025) entitled Until I Return: The Selected Plays of Ismail Khalidi, and Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora (TCG, 2015), which he also co-edited. His writing has appeared in The Nation, Guernica, American Theatre Magazine, The Dramatist, Remezcla, Al-Jazeera, Mizna and Kenyon Review.

Khalidi holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and previously been an artist-in-residence at Teatro Amal (Chile), Mizna, and Boston University’s Center on Forced Displacement. He is currently a Directing Fellow at large at Pangea World Theater.

Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. He has taught at the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, and the University of Chicago, was editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and served as President of the Middle East Studies Association. He has authored eight books, including the best-selling Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonialism and Resistance, which has been translated into over two dozen languages