Jonathan Graubart

Office: NH 128 | Email: [email protected]

Jonathan Graubart is a professor and chairperson of the political science department 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 latest article is “It is Deadly and Oppressive but Is It One State? Assessing the New One-State Reality Paradigm” (Palestine/Israel Review, 2025). He has two forthcoming publications. One is a book chapter, “Resisting Dual Oppression: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons for Contemporary American Jewish Pariahs” for the Elgar Companion to Hannah Arendt, edited by Kathleen B. Jones, Hannah Spector, and Shmuel Lederman. Two is an article for Antisemitism Studies, “Politicizing Antisemitism at the Academy: A Comparative Analysis of American University Task Forces After October 7.” Graubart’s current project examines the complicated history of the International Criminal Court’s on-and-off investigation of war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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. For Inside Higher Ed, he penned “The Unrecognized Antisemitism: The Erasure of Jewish Dissent.”

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).