Dr Dana Mills, 'Dissenting Against War and Colonialism in Writing and in Action'

Part of the Vera Fine-Grodzinski Programme for Writing Jewish Women’s Lives

The questions of war, militarism, colonialism, imperialism, dissent and Jewishness have been anything but theoretical conundrums in 2023-2024. For three months since October 7th, Dr Dana Mills wrote near-daily essays, reporting her fears, thoughts and – occasionally – hopes. These diaries were published in March 2024 as One Woman’s War.

Writing this diary was unexpected for Mills, but, at the same, was a continuation of the analysis of issues on which she has been writing (and advocating) for nearly a decade. Her biography of Rosa Luxemburg, published in 2020, sought to illuminate the life of the Jewish-Polish revolutionary (1877-1919), author of groundbreaking texts such as Reform or Revolution and the Accumulation of Capital, who was incarcerated for her dissent against the First World War and murdered by proto-fascists. Luxemburg’s life away from freedom gave her sharp and precise arguments against militarism and imperialism, combined. She was also a brave defender of freedom of speech and democracy in and from the left.

In this talk, Dr Dana Mills will explore themes of life writing in, about and against war, colonialism and imperialism, both in biography and autobiography and introduce her current projects, which continue these themes and delve deeper into them: a Hebrew edition of the Luxemburg biography and her next book project, a conceptual discussion of radical Jewish women’s critique of the nation-state.

Dr Dana Mills is a writer, activist and dancer based in Tel Aviv, Israel. She received her DPhil in politics from Mansfield College, Oxford in 2014. She is the author of four books: Dance and Politics: Moving beyond Boundaries (Manchester University Press, 2014), Rosa Luxemburg (Reaktion, 2020), Dance and Activism: 100 Years of Radical Dance Across the World (Bloomsbury, 2021), and One Woman’s War: Essays Written in War, for Peace (Five Leaves, 2023). Since 2020 she has held several positions in Israeli- Palestinian civil society including monitoring settlement expansion and advocating for freedom of movement for Palestinians to and from Gaza. She writes and fundraises for Local Call and +972 Magazine, independent, online, nonprofit magazines run by Palestinian and Israeli journalists.