"For much of her life--like many Westerners--most of what Pamela Olson knew of the Middle East was informed by headlines and stereotypes. But when she traveled to Palestine in 2003, she found herself thrown with dizzying speed into the realities of Palestinian life. Fast Times i…
"233" Result
Sort By:
"When World War I broke out in Europe in the autumn of 1914, a young diplomat was sent to Jerusalem to take charge of the Spanish consulate in the city. Antonio de la Cierva y Lewita, better known as Conde de Ballobar, recorded the events he witnessed and described his experienc…
Two years after the Arab Spring had transformed Egypt from a dictatorship under Hosni Mubarak to a democracy under the Muslim Brotherhood, there was a military coup that saw the country return being a police state. In a paradoxical turn of events, this move away from liberalism …
In this book, the author makes the connection between Islam and capitalism to examine the surprising relations between charity and the economy, the state, and religion in the transition from Mubarak-era Egypt. She draws on interviews with key players, exploring the geography of …
The crisis in Israel/Palestine has long been the world's most visible military conflict. Yet the region's cultural and intellectual life remains all but unknown to most foreign observers, which means that literary texts that make it into circulation abroad tend to be received as…
There is a long history in the West of representing Middle Eastern women as uniformly oppressed by Islam, by Islamic law, and by men. Stereotypical views of Middle Eastern women today maintain that they are without legal rights, do not attend universities or have jobs outside th…
Controversy surrounds Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, and the radical national and religious agendas at play there have come to define the area in the minds of many. This study, however, focuses instead on the process of "normalization" in the life of Jewish reside…
Semitic words and names appear in unprecedented numbers in texts of the New Kingdom, the period when the Egyptian empire extended into Syria-Palestine. In his book, James Hoch provides a comprehensive account of these words--their likely origins, their contexts, and their implic…
"Hundreds of Palestinian villages were left empty across Israel when their residents became refugees after the 1948 war. Most of these villages were razed by the new State of Israel, their lands and property confiscated, but in dozens of others, communities of Jews were settled-…
Surveying the population and revenue of six Palestinian cities-Jerusalem, Hebron, Gaza, Ramie, Nabulus, and Safed-in the sixteenth-century, Amnon Cohen and Bernard Lewis consider the numbers, composition, and distribution of the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish population, and disc…
A look at the end of British rule in Palestine, through the eyes of its final high commissioner. British General Sir Allan Cunningham was appointed in 1945 as high commissioner of Palestine, and served in this capacity until the end of the British mandate on May 15, 1948. The th…
Though now remembered as an act of anti-colonial protest leading to the Egyptian military coup of 1952, the Cairo Fire that burned through downtown stores and businesses appeared to many at the time as an act of urban self-destruction and national suicide. The logic behind this …
In this pioneering history of transportation and communication in the modern Middle East, On Barak argues that contrary to accepted wisdom technological modernity in Egypt did not drive a sense of time focused on standardization only. Surprisingly, the introduction of the steame…
"From the late nineteenth century through the post-Holocaust era, the world was divided between countries that tried to expel their Jewish populations and those that refused to let them in. The plight of these traumatized refugees inspired numerous proposals for Jewish states. J…
Noah Haiduc-Dale focuses on the relationship between Arab Christians and the nationalist movement in Palestine as the British Mandate unfolded throughout the first half of the 20th century. Evidence of individual behaviours and beliefs, as well as those of Christian organization…
From the beginning of the twentieth century until World War I, about 35,000 Jews reached Palestine. Historians and social scientists have tended to apply different criteria to immigration to Palestine than those usual in the study of immigration. They have stressed the uniquenes…
"This essential book offers a compelling and original interpretation of the rise of military aviation. Jeremy Black, one of the world's finest scholars of military history, provides a lucid analysis of the use of airpower over land and sea both during the two world wars and the …
During the postwar period of 1948-56, over 400,000 Jews from the Middle East and Asia immigrated to the newly established state of Israel. By the end of the 1950s, Mizrahim, also known as Oriental Jewry, represented the ethnic majority of the Israeli Jewish population. Despite t…