Joel Beinin

Intending to move to Israel permanently, he joined other members of Hashomer Hatzair in living and working at Kibbutz Lahav.

There, on encountering attitudes that struck him as being contemptuous of Palestinians,[2] he gradually became disenchanted with his early ideals, and declared himself to no longer be a Zionist.

[7] Among his later work is a study of the Jewish communities of modern Egypt which led to his major historical study, The Dispersion Of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, And The Formation Of A Modern Diaspora (1998), which examines the diversity of Egyptian Jewish identities in Egypt and in the diaspora.

He has engaged in fieldwork to collect oral reports among many Egyptian Jewish communities dispersed throughout the world after the Suez War of 1956, among them the Karaites of San Francisco.

Shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Beinin was placed on a list of individuals deemed to be "negligent in defending civilization" (together with 39 other faculty members at U.S. universities) by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a conservative non-profit group devoted to curbing liberal tendencies in academia.

[13] As mentioned in a Stanford Daily article, Beinin described the harm caused by the 2023 October 7 attacks by Hamas as both the loss of lives and the exclusion of the group from future international peace discussions.