Rebecca Stein's research studies linkages between cultural and political processes in Israel in relation to its military occupation and the history of Palestinian dispossession. She is the author of (with Adi Kuntsman) Digital Militarism: Israel's Occupation in the Social Media Age (Stanford University Press, 2015), which studies the interplay between new media and military occupation in the Israel/Palestine context, Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism (Duke University Press, 2008), which considers the relationship between tourism, mobility politics, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the co-editor of Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2005) with Ted Swedenburg and The Struggle for Sovereignty: Palestine and Israel, 1993-2005 with Joel Beinin (Stanford University Press, 2006). 

She is currently continuing work on a multi-book project about the ways that new communication technologies are meditating the everyday Israeli relationship to its military occupation -- including the ways such technologies are changing practices and logics of military 'counterinsurgency,' altering the everyday terms of soldiering, changing the Israeli civilian relationship to Palestinians under occupation, and remaking the terrain of human rights work and anti-occupation activism within Israel. Her first book on this topic, Digital Militarism: Israel's Occupation in the Social Media Age ( (with Adi Kuntsman), studied the place of social media within this equation. The second book project, Viral Occupation: Military Rule On Camera, considers the role of photographic technologies and viral image networks within this framework, with a focus on how the smartphone camera has altered this political landscape. This work has been supported by grants from the Wenner Gren foundation and Palestinian American Research Council. 

Stein's work on Israeli cultural politics has appeared in such journals as Critical Inquiry, Anthropological Quarterly, The International Journal of Middle East Studies, Social Text, Public Culture, Theory and Event, Journal of Palestine Studies, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.