Workshop
Returning to Kanafani’s Haifa
24–25 March,2026
Katholische Akademie in Berlin e.V.
Return to Haifa © Dima Tannir
Returning to Kanafani’s Haifa
Workshop
24–25 March, 2026
Katholische Akademie in Berlin e.V.
Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Returning to Haifa (1969) remains one of the most discussed texts in Palestinian literature. This novella, his last before his assassination, tells the story of a Palestinian couple, Said and Safiyya, who return to their lost home in Haifa twenty years after being forced to flee during the 1948 Nakba. Upon their return, they find that their infant son, Khaldun—left behind in the chaos of their displacement—has been raised by a Holocaust survivor, Miriam, under the name Dov, and now serves as a soldier in the Israeli army.
Set against the aftermath of 1948 and the reverberations of 1967, Returning to Haifa is a story of personal loss and a meditation on historical rupture. The narrative unfolds as a confrontation between past and present and as an encounter between multiple displacements—Nakba and Holocaust, exile and return, memory and erasure. In its tightly woven structure, the novella stages a layered confrontation between competing claims to home, identity, and belonging, prompting the reader to confront unresolved historical traumas without offering the comfort of closure.
Despite the extensive scholarship on the novella, the text still allows further interpretations and contemplation. As Elias Khoury notes, Kanafani’s writing “encapsulates rather than narrates, condenses rather than draws out,” offering dense and multifaceted layers of meaning. While some readings have viewed the text as didactic, closer scrutiny reveals its deep contradictions and complexities, inviting continuous re-examination. Indeed, as Barbara Harlow articulates, Kanafani’s work does not merely present a set of ideological positions but rather “opens these contradictions to a productive analysis which would eventually redefine the borders.” It is in this spirit that we seek to return to Returning to Haifa.
Yet, by situating the novella as our point of departure, the workshop also goes beyond it, examining the afterlives and adaptations but also the debates, inconsistencies, and opposing perspectives the reading of the novella invites. What is more, we wish to ponder: what does it mean to situate Kanafani and this specific text as our focal point at this current moment?
Organisation
Ido Fuchs, Loaay Wattad, and Elad Lapidot
Cooperation
Supported by the Katholische Akademie in Berlin, EUME – Forum Transregionale Studien, Philipps-Universität Marburg, the Department for Romance, Slavic, and Oriental Languages at the University of Lille, and the Berlin Center for Intellectual Diaspora.
Participants
Avigail Ben Dor Niv
I am a Reform rabbi, scholar, and writer, born in Jerusalem in 1989 and ordained in Berlin in 2024. I currently serve as the rabbi of Migwan, the liberal Jewish community of Basel (the only woman serving as a community rabbi in Switzerland).
I hold a B.A. (cum laude) in Talmud and in the History and Philosophy of Science from Tel Aviv University and the Freie Universität Berlin, and an M.A. (cum laude) in Talmudic and Rabbinic Literature from the University of Potsdam. My master’s thesis demonstrated that the gender-specific obligation of the commandment of ״פרו ורבו״ (designated exclusively for men) was intentionally concealed from women; I showed that this too constitutes a case of “הלכה ואין מורין כן”, even though the rabbinic text actively attempts to obscure it.
I am currently developing my research on the ways women can penetrate the Talmudic text, often through modes of disguise, substitution, and narrative doubling, while reflecting on the textual constructions of womanhood and on my own future modes of action as a woman operating within rabbinic dimensions.
In my rabbinic work, I move in a רצוא ושוב rhythm- devotion and heresy, secular and religious, academic and mythical/mystical. I am also working on a new trilingual (German–English–Hebrew), gender-neutral Siddur.
Alongside my rabbinic scholarship, I also write about art and culture, and have studied and stil making film(s). I wrote a horror series set in Mea Shearim centered around a female demon and have edited dozens of documentary films and series on a wide range of subjects. I work across Hebrew, German, English, and Romanian.
In recent years I have turned to examining how German (or german-”jewish”) discourse attempts to impose a prescribed Jewish identity shaped by displaced guilt and hostility thinly veiled as ethical responsibility and a good old mix of ignorance – which affect my life in direct, tangible ways.
Annamaria Bianco is Assistant Professor (tenure-track) in Modern Arabic Language and Literature at Aix-Marseille University and Associate Researcher at the Institut français du Proche-Orient (Ifpo-DEAMM). Her research focuses on contemporary Arabic literature, translation, adaptation, estrangement and exile. She co-edited the volumes Contemporary Arabic Literature and Migration: New Poetics and Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2026) and Exil et traduction. Regards sur un croisement fécond (Classiques Garnier, 2024).
Ido Fuchs is an affiliated EUME doctoral Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien and recently submitted his dissertation on the poetics of return in Palestinian literature at the Program for Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University. In 2026, Fuchs will join the Affective Societies Collaborative Research Center at the Freie Universität Berlin as a postdoctoral fellow. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Interventions, Biography, Journal of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies, and Theoretical Practice.
Christian Junge is a senior lecturer in the field of modern Arabic literature and culture at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Marburg University. He received his PhD from Freie University Berlin on literature and language in the work of in the work of al-Shidyāq (d. 1887). His recent book project “Affective Readings” deals with emotions and affects in contemporary Egyptian literature from 1990 to 2020. His latest publications include “Tarab: Sonic Affects” in PMLA. In addition, he is co-director of the international programm „Arabic Philologies“ and Principle Investigator of the Merian Center for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM).
Zahiye Kundos is a scholar of modern Arabic and Islamic Studies. She specializes in modern Islam, Arabic literature, and the Nahḍa, the modern Arabic intellectual and cultural history. She is currently a lecturer at the Barenboim-Said Academy in Berlin and a research associate at the Simon Dubnow Institute in Leipzig.
Elad Lapidot is professor for Culture Studies at the University of Lille, France. He specializes in philosophy, Jewish thought and Talmud and was teaching at the University of Bern, Switzerland, the Humboldt Universität Berlin and the Freie Universität Berlin. His work is guided by questions concerning the relation between knowledge and politics. Among his publications: Jews Out of the Question. A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism (SUNY Press, 2020), Hebrew translation with introduction and commentary of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, Vol. 1 (Resling, 2020), Heidegger and Jewish Thought. Difficult Others, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and Etre sans mot dire : La logiqe de ‘Sein und Zeit’ (Zeta Books, 2010).
Manar H. Makhoul is a Lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Tel Aviv University and co-editor of Mafteakh–Muftah: Lexical Review of Political Thought. He holds a PhD in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Cambridge. His research and teaching focus on Palestinian literature, identity, and intellectual history, with a particular interest in post-2010 transformations. His book Palestinian Citizens in Israel: A History Through Fiction, 1948–2010 was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2020.
Eli Osheroff is a historian of the modern Middle East, with a focus on Arab political and intellectual history and the Arab-Zionist conflict. He holds a PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Truman Institute, at the Jacob Robinson Institute at the Hebrew University, and in the Dan David Society of Fellows at Tel Aviv University. In the academic year 2025/26, he is a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien. His first book, forthcoming from the Van Leer Institute, examines Arab political imagination from the late Ottoman period to 1948. Eli’s articles have appeared in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Israel-Palestine Review, and other venues.
Loaay Wattad is a sociologist of literature and a scholar of Palestinian children’s literature. He is a Minerva Postdoctoral Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin and an affiliated researcher at the Forum Transregionale Studien (EUME). His research examines political imagination, unhomeliness, and structures of dispossession in Palestinian and Israeli children’s literature.
Program
| Tuesday, 24 March 2026 | |
| 14:30–15:00 | Brief Welcome and Introduction Coffee Break – Info-Eck, 3rd Floor |
| 15:00–16:30 | Session I – Comparing Returns Manar Makhoul – Who Tells the Story? Re-reading Returning to Haifa through The Pessoptimist Eli Osheroff – Refugeeness, Decolonization, and Belonging in Returning to Haifa |
| 16:30 | Coffee Break – Info-Eck, 3rd Floor |
| 17:00–18:30 | Session II – The Thought of Return and the Afterlives of Haifa Elad Lapidot – Kanafani and the Thought of Return / Resistance Literature Annamaria Bianco – Return(s) to Haifa: Adaptation as Transcreation |
| 19:00 | Dinner |
| Wednesday, 25 March 2026 | |
| 09:30–10:00 | Morning Coffee – Info-Eck, 3rd Floor |
| 10:00–11:30 | Workshop Christian Junge Interactive Workshop Session |
| 11:30–12:00 | Coffee Break – Info-Eck, 3rd Floor |
| 12:00-13:30 | Session III – Where Is Home? Loaay Wattad – Returning to Jaffa: Das Unheimlich and the Sociology of Home Avigail Ben-Dor Niv – “Wherever I go, I go to the Land of Israel” |
| 13:30-15:00 | Lunch Break – Restaurant |
| 15:00-16:30 | Session IV – Subtle Readings Zahiye Kundos – On the Subtle Transcendental Elements Ido Fuchs – Safiyya’s Silence: Returning from the Margins |
| 16:30-17:00 | Coffee Break – Info-Eck, 3rd Floor |
| 17:00-18:30 | Closing Session – Kanafani Today Roundtable – Kanafani Today Moderated Open Discussion General Discussion and Closing Remarks |
