Film Screening & Discussion
The Palestine Exception
October 4, starting at 12 pm ET / 9 am PT
VIRTUAL EVENT
FREE - please consider making a donation to:
Middle East Children's Alliance
TRAILER:
WATCH TRAILER
In our ongoing effort to invite reflection and engage in dialogue about the importance and impact of speaking up about Palestine, please join us for a screening of The Palestine Exception followed by a panel discussion with following speakers: Jan Haaken, filmmaker and professor, Jennifer Zachariah, attorney and writer, and Brooke Lober, activist and scholar. The discussion is moderated by Mamta Dadlani, Section IX Education & Training Co-Chair.
Together, we will ask: What challenges arise—personally, socially, materially—when we choose to engage rather than look away? What parts of the self must be confronted: ego, fear, the comfort of dissociation? And what might be gained in doing so—clarity, integrity, alignment? What are the reasons we chose not to speak in our sessions with patients, with our families, in our communities?
As we grapple with these questions, we invite you to reflect in community, to reckon with what is being asked of us, and to dream up together what action can look like.
Please join us for all or either of the following components of the program:
Film Viewing 9-10:15am PST/ 12-1:15 pm EST
Discussion 10:30am-12pm PST/ 1:30-3pm EST
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Jan Haaken is professor emeritus of psychology at Portland State University, a clinical psychologist, and documentary filmmaker. From refugee camps, war zones, abortion clinics, and climate protests to drag bars, dairy farms and hip-hop clubs, her films focus on contested social spaces and sites of cultural controversy. Haaken has directed nine feature films, including Our Bodies Our Doctors (2018), the two-part Necessity series: Oil, Water & Climate Resistance and Climate Justice & the Thin Green Line (2023), Atomic Bamboozle: The False Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance (2023) and The Palestine Exception (2025). Her books include Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory and the Perils of Looking Back (1998), Hard Knocks: Domestic Violence and the Psychology of Storytelling (2011), and Psychiatry, Politics and PTSD: Breaking Down (2021). Haaken is a member of Section IX and serves on the editorial board of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society.
Jennifer Zacharia is a Bay Area-based lawyer and writer. A graduate of Columbia Law School, she has been a Visiting Fellow at Georgetown University-Qatar, and worked as a researcher at UC Berkeley. Her articles have appeared in the Boston Review and the Nation, and she has also given several endowed lectures, including the Edward W. Said Lecture at the Palestine Center, and the Paul Kardoush Memorial Lecture at the University of Houston. Her article "On the Responsibility of Journalists" appears in the latest issue of the Boston Review.
Brooke Lober (she/they) is an activist and a scholar of feminist and queer-trans studies, and is a lecturer in the department of Gender and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley. Brooke is currently researching and writing about legacies of antiracist and anti-Zionist Jewish feminisms and related social justice movements in the Bay Area. Brooke’s writing is published in numerous scholarly journals, and on websites of radical culture. Brooke is an organizer with the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace, and with FSJP-UC Berkeley, as well as the Bay2Gaza Mutual Aid Collective.
Mamta Dadlani is a licensed clinical psychologist who engages in clinical practice, training and research through a lens of critical social inquiry and social justice. Mamta has a relational analytic psychotherapy practice based in Berkeley, California that actively addresses intrapsychic, interpersonal, and structural dynamics as informed by race, gender, sexuality, immigration, and adoption and her scholarship explore themes of coloniality, queerness, and clinical theory. Mamta is co-chair of the Education and training committee of section ix Within the society for psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic psychotherapy and an Associate Adjunct Professor at Smith School for Social Work.
