A collection of lectures that seek to represent current thinking on a variety of contemporary and historical issues in the the Middle East. Topics covered include Islamic economies, leaders, monarchs, historiography, and Jewish and Islamic civilizations.
For many centuries, the mountainous Caucasus region was a strategic backwater, inhabited by insular peoples and tribes, where the raw edges of Christian and Muslim empires rubbed abrasively together. Most of the Caucasus was absorbed into the Russian empire in the 10th century; its 112 recognized nationalities were thus all eventually smothered by ......
Although Jewish communities have thrived in Iraq, Tunisia and Morocco, as well as in south-west Asia and North Africa, knowledge of these cultures is limited. This book presents an anthology of work describing the lives and culture of Jews in the Middle East in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Imagine a traditional Jewish community on the eve of the 19th century, and you will most likely picture the Eastern European shtetl. This prevailing European-oriented view obscures the fact that Jewry is a coat of many colors, with many diverse yet traditional manifestations, including the numerous Jewish communities of North Africa and Southwest ......
Arms, Embargo, Military Power and Decision in the 1948 Palestine War
On May 29, 1948, two weeks after five regular Arab armies invaded Palestine in an attempt to erase the lately established Jewish state, the UN Security Council imposed an embargo, which banned the supply of arms, war materials, and other forms of military aid to the parties directly involved in the Palestine conflict. During the embargo the ......
The signing of the September 1993 Israel-PLO agreement, one of the twentieth century's most dramatic political events, coincided almost to the day with the twentieth anniversary of the October 1973 war. While the precise timing was coincidental, the relationship between the two events is crucial. The 1973 war ironically marked the beginning of an ......
Labor and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century Persian Gulf
In 1975, Kuwaiti workers orchestrated arguably the most powerful citizen-led movement for noncitizen rights in the history of the Persian Gulf. Their efforts built on decades of wide-ranging struggle over the meanings and outlines of citizenship. During the twentieth century, anticolonial nationalists, pro-democracy reformers, feminists, and labor ......
A group of international scholars, applying insights drawn from history, folklore, political anthropology, historiography, cultural criticism and literary theory, re-examines critical issues surrounding the birth of Israel.
