Gabriel Noah Brahm - NMU English

• Ph.D., Literature and Cultural Studies (with an emphasis in Politics), University of California at Santa Cruz
• M.A., Literature (with a notation in American Studies), University of California at Santa Cruz
• B.A., English, UCLA
• Diploma in Israel Studies, Brandeis University
• Certificate in Teaching Writing, San Francisco State University

Contact Information: [email protected]

Mr. Gabriel Noah Brahm was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied German, British and American literature; completing a senior thesis on the poet William Carlos Williams and philosopher Martin Heidegger, under the direction of trailblazing deconstructionist critic, Joseph N. Riddel; while also serving as a writing tutor for the UCLA Bruins athletics program. 

Subsequently, he pursued a series of complementary credentials in the humanities and social sciences that prepared him for an intellectually varied career in an eclectic constellation of mutually reinforcing subfields—first, enrolling as an MA candidate in Composition and Rhetoric at San Francisco State University, where his contemporaries would include the ethicist and renowned Jewish Studies scholar, Adam Newton; then, going on from there to UCSC, in order to do postgraduate work in Rhetoric, Politics, and American Studies, thus charting a unique, transdisciplinary path of research and pedagogical training that included serving as Head TA for the noted political theorist, J. Peter Euben, while earning a Ph.D. from the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies for a dissertation on Hannah Arendt and postmodernism; finally capping his formal education with another degree, in Israel Studies, from Brandeis University, under the guidance of S. Ilan Troen. 

After returning to Santa Cruz as a Visiting Professor, for a formative stint spent teaching a variety of small seminars and large lecture courses on a range of interconnected subjects, offered through the related departments of Philosophy, Politics, and American Studies (and as the latter department began to dissolve itself to re-form as a program in Ethnic Studies), he left to join Northern’s tenured English faculty—signing on as a specialist in literary theory, film studies, Israeli literature, composition and rhetoric—and where he was approved as well to teach in the Department of Philosophy, while regularly offering classes for NMU’s Honors Program in addition. 

In recent years, his innovative research into “nano-humanities” (or efforts aimed at cultivating increasingly refined methods for making higher education ever more accessible to a wider range of learning styles, by carefully discerning the “micro-logics” at work within an increasingly diverse and hyper-individuated student-body demographic’s proliferation of learning styles) has extended to include the vast new horizons and hitherto untold possibilities of digital education, opened up by the latest technologies for promoting a distinctively 21st-century pedagogy that combines the virtues of online and in-person instruction.

Long in demand around the world for his blend of traditional, canonical learning with innovative hermeneutic strategies, he has been appointed to a variety of posts internationally, for example: as Visiting Professor in the School of Philosophy and Religions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Visiting Researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS); Senior Research Fellow at University of Haifa’s Herzl Institute for the Study of Zionism; Visiting Lecturer at Yad Vashem (Israel’s World Holocaust Remembrance Center); Visiting Professor in the Program in Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey; Visiting Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of the Andes in Bogota, Colombia; Visiting Professor of Modern American Poetry and Poetics in the Department of Translation Studies at Shandong University in Weihai, China; Wiesel-King Scholar with the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) at St. John’s College, Oxford; and Scholar in Residence at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. A longtime Advisory Editor at the journal of Israeli and Middle East affairs, Fathom: For a Deeper View of Israel and the Region, he served prior to that as a founding Associate Editor of the first online journal of Cultural Studies, Politics and Culture: An International Review of Books. 

Recipient of numerous honors and accolades, he won a Peter White Scholar Award; earned an Israel Institute Faculty Development Grant; was provided several Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) Research Fellowships; and applied successfully to implement multiple Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) Research Grants; among other laurels.

• Philosophical Anthropology and Literary Theory
• Israeli Literature and Middle East Studies
• Political Philosophy and Social Thought
• Film Theory and Psychoanalysis 
• Digital Composition and Rhetoric
• Nano-Humanities and Teaching Online
• World Literature and Great Books of Western Civilization

“After School: The Place of Social Justice at the University,” Doc Emet, December 31, 2022.

“Self-Hating Nazis,” Telos, Number 197, Winter 2021.

“Canceling Israel?,” Telos, Number 195, Summer 2021.

“The New Blank Slate,” The American Mind, August 31, 2021.

“Intersectionality,” Israel Studies, Volume 24, Issue 2, 2019.

“Slouching Toward the City that Never Stops,” in Doron Ben-Atar and Andrew Pessin (eds.), Campus Antisemitism’s Assault on Free Speech and the University, Indiana UP, 2018.

“Killing the Messenger: Mark Lilla’s ‘End of Identity Liberalism’ and its Critics,” Society, Volume 54, Issue 4, 2017.

“תנועת החרם על ישראל כסימפטום” [Anti-Israel Boycotts as a Symptom], Assaf Orion and Shahar Eilam (eds.), Strategic Assessment of the Threat Posed by BDS and Delegitimization to Israel and the Jewish Diaspora (Tel Aviv: Institute for National Security Studies, 2017).

“Shakespeare’s Fault or Yours?,” Perspectives on Political Science, Volume 44, Issue 4, 2015.

The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel (coedited with Cary Nelson), Wayne State UP, 2014. The first full-length study of the “BDS” phenomenon.

The Jester and the Sages: Mark Twain in Conversation with Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx (coauthored with Forrest G. Robinson and Catherine Carlstroem), UP of Missouri, 2012.

“Holocaust Envy: The Libidinal Economy of the New Antisemitism,” Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, Vol. 3, Issue 2, 2012.

“Reading City of Quartz in Ankara: Two Years of Magical Thinking in Orhan Pamuk’s Middle East,” Rethinking History, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2007.

“Understanding Noam Chomsky: A Reconsideration,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol. 23, No. 5, 2006.

Prosthetic Territories: Politics and Hypertechnologies (coedited with Mark Driscoll), Westview Press, 1995. The first anthology of cyborg studies.