Jonathan Graubart

Office: NH 128 | Email: [email protected]

Jonathan Graubart is a professor and chair of political science at San Diego State. He specializes in the areas of international relations, international law, Israel-Palestine, Zionism and Jewish dissent. Graubart received his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2002 and his JD from UC Berkeley Law School in 1989. 

Graubart’s recent book is Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism: Lessons from Hannah Arendt and other Pariahs (Temple University Press 2023). His article “It is Deadly and Oppressive but Is It One State? Assessing the New One-State Reality Paradigm” is forthcoming in Palestine/Israel Review. His two present projects deal, respectively, with the challenges faced by American Jewish dissenters post-Oct 7 and what to make of the International Criminal Court’s startling request for arrest warrants of Israel’s Prime Minister and Defense Minister. 

Graubart occasionally writes op-eds for such forums as Truth Out, Common Dreams, and Academe (an academic freedom blog) and serves on the academic advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. He recently penned “To Confront Antisemitism, Stand with the Oppressed, Not Today’s Pharaohs.” 

Prior to academia, Graubart experienced a varied professional career, which includes working for President Ronald Reagan (as an attorney at the US Treasury Department) and for Michael Lerner (as an editorial staff member at Tikkun Magazine). As a San Francisco attorney, Graubart engaged in plaintiff's-side civil litigation against perpetrators of securities fraud (his first case being against Walt Disney) and worked pro bono in the areas of poverty law and asylum law for political refugees from Central America. 

Graubart has pursued a number of professional interests in his life. He was a fisherman, a factory worker, and a circus promoter (though he never succeeded at his attempts to develop a juggling act). He has vague memories of writing sermons for his birth father, an itinerant Baptist preacher (sometimes getting ideas from his adopted father, a rabbi).