Brooke Lober

Brooke Lober is a lecturer in Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley who offers classes in feminist, queer and trans thought, with emphasis in American studies, cultural studies, and social movement history.

Brooke’s book-length manuscript (in progress) situates late 20^th century Jewish feminism in the context of the U.S. and Israel’s entwined racial regimes, analyzing the effect of state formations on social movement politics and culture by studying moments of cohesion and division in activist networks. Addressing the contemporary crisis of the “war on Palestine,” this work argues that current debates about relationships between Jewishness, antisemitism, Zionism and Palestine are informed by over 40 years of conflict in overlapping spaces of feminist-queer-trans and Jewish thought and must be reconsidered in light of the contemporary politics of Palestinian liberation. Brooke has completed more than 30 oral history interviews for this project, some of which are featured on the website womenagainstimperialism.com.

With Dr. Alisa Bierria and Dr. Jakeya Caruthers and arts editor Amanda Priebe, Brooke co-edited the two-volume anthology Abolition Feminisms (2022) to critically explore histories and methods of grassroots feminisms through writing, art, and the documentation of social movement history. While abolition feminisms are often instrumentalized or underestimated in their power to shape multiple social movements, this collection situates these experiments in resistance and survival in the “long arc of ethical life-making and everyday practice that has always been at the root of abolitionist possibility, the heart of abolition itself.” In a related project, Brooke conducted oral history interviews with former members of the organization Out of Control: Lesbian Committee to Support Women Political Prisoners; with former member Jane Segal, Brooke co-edited a special issue based on this research for the lesbian journal Sinister Wisdom (Issue 126, 2022).

Additional Publications:

• “Rejecting Project Esther: Understanding Christian White Nationalism as Racism and Antisemitism,” ,” co-authored with members of the Jewish Voice for Peace Academic Council, Contending Modernities, 2025
• “Who Made it Possible for Me to Be Here?” in Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah. Bassichis, Saper and Valinsky, eds. New York: Wendy’s Subway Press, 2023
• “Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends,” Jewish Women’s Archive, 2022
• “Jonah at the Narrow Bridge: A Jewish Anti-Zionist Makes Chanukkah Lights from Scratch,” Tikkun Magazine, 2020
• “Out of Control: Lesbian Committee to Support Women Political Prisoners” in Berger, Dan and Hobson, Emily, eds. Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973-2001. University of Georgia Press, 2020
• “‘Everything’s Connected’: An Interview with Aurora Levins-Morales,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 18.2 (2019): 372–393.
• “When Bridges Break: Jewish Lesbian Feminism, Identity Politics, and the ‘Hard Ground’ of Alliance,” Journal of Lesbian Studies, (2019) DOI: 10.1080/10894160.2018.1501537
• “Adrienne Rich’s ‘Politics of Location,’ U.S. Jewish Feminism, and the Question of Palestine,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 46.7 (2017): 663-683.