“Engineering Progress” is a comparative study of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century regional development. It situates nature, technology, and culture within the wider global processes by which an abstract but universal ideal of progress spread around the world. In theor…
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Each society that relies on divination curates an ensemble of means and personnel that comprise a divinatory economy. Dreams represent a peculiar means of acquiring divined knowledge in the divinatory economy of the ancient Near East. They may be uninduced phenomena; or they may…
As a socio-cultural history of disease in Palestine, this dissertation examines the problem of malaria during the period of British rule, focusing specifically on the place of Zionist anti-malaria campaigns in the processes of Zionist nation-building and in the transformation of…
The dissertation argues that the Jerusalem temple functioned in ancient Israel/Judah as an economic institution in ways similar to Mesopotamian temples of the seventh to fifth centuries B.C.E. The study analyzes the administrative and economic information from temple archives in…
This dissertation examines the creation of a Jewish physical culture in Mandatory Palestine through the analysis and comparison of the following national festivals: the beauty competitions for Queen Esther in conjunction with the Purim carnivals in Tel Aviv from 1926–1929; the f…
This work examines the behavior of riparians in water scarce regions and in a protracted conflict environment. It seeks to answer two questions: why would a riparian that is more politically, militarily and economically powerful still choose to cooperate and even to compromise o…
In mandatory Palestine, Zionist civil society proved to be a powerful instrument for institution- and state-building. Civil society developed around four conditions: shared values, horizontal linkages of participation, boundary demarcation and interaction with the state. These f…
In the pre-state era before Israel's establishment in 1948, when most Zionist organizations concentrated on political lobbying and land development to advance the Zionist cause, Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America, adopted a radically different—and at the time,…
This is a genealogy of the “new accent” in Hebrew poetry in Palestine. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Hebrew language “revivalists” made a concerted and ultimately successful effort to adopt Hebrew as a modern spoken language in the Jewish settlement in Pal…
One of the practical issues involved in estimating the effects of changes in the US labor market is isolating the changes in the areas under study from broader changes in the economy. For this reason, one might be better able to isolate these effects with a case study where thes…
Between the years 1903 and 1914, nationalist activists inside and outside the Jewish Yishuv (pre-state community) of Palestine devoted considerable resources to the creation of a new Jewish national culture. The very first foundations for this culture had been laid in the two pr…
This research deals with setting up a GIS and hydrological modeling based approach for sustainable water resources management in the West Bank of Palestine. This water sustainability approach took into consideration the water balance, the social, the economic, the demographic, t…
This thesis makes a contribution to the study of Israeli foreign policy, Israeli-American relations and the role of Israeli political culture in foreign policy. First, all the works on American-Israeli relations focus on American policy. Second, works examining the role of Israe…
The interplay of religion and politics has been a consistent theme in the comparative politics of identity, and more specifically with regard to Middle Eastern politics. Yet coverage of religion and politics in the region is generally focused on the Muslim majority and neglects …
“Spirits of Palestine: Palestinian Village Women and Stories of the Jinn” examines the lives of women in a neighborhood of Artas, a village in the Palestinian West Bank. The first half of the thesis focusses on how women understand and live according to specific gendered moral p…
This work examines the published travel accounts of fifty-one American women who ventured to Palestine in the nineteenth century. Biographical information is contained within, yet the brunt of the work examines the commonalties of their published accounts such as their portrayal…
This study examines the historical circumstances and philosophical foundations of American water resource development plans for the Jordan River Valley. Between 1860 and 1970, Americans proposed water resource development plans for the Jordan River Valley. Inherent in each of th…
This dissertation investigates the way in which institutions shape the contours of contemporary state violence. It does so by asking why Serbia supported “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia during 1992, the first year of Bosnia's independence, while Israel engaged in a policy of “ethni…