Monday, April 28, 202510:00 AM - 11:15 AM (Pacific Time)
Webinar
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Co-organized by the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies and the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University. Co-sponsored by the UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Department of History, the UCLA Department of Geography, the UCLA Program in Digital Humanities, and the UCLA Center for Middle East Development.
Introducing "Kol ha-Nekudot”/“All the Points”/“Kull al-Nuqaṭ"
Long home to diverse communities of varying religious, ethnic, and ideological character, the Israeli-Palestinian region has also experienced tremendous demographic change in the past century and a half. Zionism and the State of Israel led to the founding of nearly one thousand new Jewish communities, some of which–in the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, and West Bank–were later uprooted. On the Arab side, in addition to the more than four hundred villages abandoned or destroyed during the Israeli War of Independence or Palestinian Nakba, scores of new settlements have emerged, both in Israel proper and the Palestinian Territories. Tracking this diversity and change bedevils traditional mapping and challenges student and scholar alike.
Enter “All the Points”—a digital mapping project created by Dr. Daniel Stein Kokin with GIS programming work done by Dr. Solomon Vimal (Ph.D, UCLA Department of Geography)—which draws upon the dynamism of digital mapping to tell the story of the Israeli-Palestinian region in a fresh, accessible, and visually compelling manner. Inspired by the classic Zionist designation of new Jewish communities as additional “points on the map,” “All the Points” expands this rhetoric to include Arab, European Christian, and other communities as equal parties in an ongoing narrative. Using colors and shapes, the project’s main map traces the founding, disappearance, and evolution of communities on an annual basis from 1840 down to 2023, while curated maps highlight specific features of the region’s settlement history at varying time scales. “All the Points” aspires to be a useful tool in the classroom and at home, wherever and whenever people wish to better understand one of the world’s most complicated and intractable conflicts.
Learn more about "All the Points" by watching the video below.
About the Creator of "All the Points"
Dr. Daniel Stein Kokin is a Jewish and Israel Studies scholar affiliated with Arizona State University and the Ramaz Upper School in New York City. In 2024–2025, he is a fellow in Advanced Israel Studies at Brandeis University’s Schusterman Center for Israel Studies. He has previously taught at Yale, UCLA, the University of Oregon, and the University of Greifswald (Germany), and has held fellowships from Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy and the Käte Hamburger Kolleg in Bochum, Germany. Recent publications include the edited volume Hebrew between Jews and Christians (De Gruyter, 2022) and “‘Arch-Enemy’: The Polemic against Titus in Benjamin of Tudela’s Book of Travels” (Hebrew Union College Annual, 2023). Stein Kokin also creates academic performances, including “Breach of Protocols: Revisiting Zion’s Elders” and “Inversions and Subversions: Leone de’ Sommi’s Purim Comedy of Betrothal,”, on the first Hebrew-language play.
From 2017–2019, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the UCLA International Institute, with a primary focus on Israel Studies, and in 2015–16, he served as the Viterbi Professor of Mediterranean Jewish Studies at UCLA.
Discussants
A leading scholar in the field of Israel Studies, Yael Zerubavel is Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies and History at Rutgers University, where she also previously served as the founding Director of the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life. She is the author of the widely acclaimed books Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (1995) and Desert in the Promised Land (2019), key texts in the academic study of Israeli nation-building. In addition, Zerubavel has undertaken important work in the fields of Israeli culture, cultural memory, Jewish immigrant experience, Jewish memory, Jewish space, and trauma in Israeli culture.
More discussants for this webinar will be announced soon.
DISCLAIMER: The views or opinions of our guest speakers and the content of their presentations do not necessarily reflect the views of the UCLA Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. Hosting speakers does not constitute an endorsement of the speaker's views or opinions.
Sponsor(s): Center for Middle East Development, Department of History, Department of Geography, Center for Digital Humanities, The Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University