Hold the Date & Goings on about town

Coming soon!

 

 

 

 

 
Readings on Middle Eastern History
by Palestinian, Israeli, Jewish, Musilim and Christian Scholars

 

 

Highly Recommended Authors

History and Research
Tom Segev is an Israeli intellectual, journalist, and historian. Segev's parents fled Nazi Germany in 1935 and settled in Palestine. His father was killed in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.Segev writes for Ha'aretz, a major Israeli liberal newspaper, and has published several books.
In One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, Segev contends that violent conflict between Jewish and Arab nationalism was inevitable as the two groups could not co-exist given their contrary aims. This departs from traditional Israeli histories which have concluded that Israelis never wanted conflict, and hence blames the Israel-Palestinian conflict on the Palestinians' violent reactions. Segev additionally argues that the British were pro-Zionist (a possibility often dismissed by Israeli historians), and that British support for Zionism stemmed from a misguided and anti-Semitic belief that Jews turned the wheels of history. Segev's works are often criticized by both right-wing Israelis (for being too 'pro-Palestinian') and by Palestinian Arabs as well, who feel that his works are too pro-Israeli.
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, and the head of Columbia's Middle East Institute. He received a B.A. from Yale University, where he was a member of Wolf's Head Society, in 1970, and a D. Phil. from Oxford University in 1974 and spent many years as a professor and director of both the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for International Studies at the University of Chicago before joining the Columbia faculty. He has also taught at Georgetown University, Lebanese University, and the American University of Beirut, and served as an advisor at the Madrid Conference of 1991 between the U.S., Israel, Palestinians and Arab states.  His book, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1997), won the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Prize as best book of 1997.
Fiction
Naguib Mahfouz, A Nobel Prize winner of literature,  was born in Cairo..He published 34 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts and five plays over a 70-year career. Many of his works have been made into Arabic-language films. Children of Gebelawi (1959), one of Mahfouz's best known works, has been banned in Egypt for alleged blasphemy over its allegorical portrayal of God and the monotheistic Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In 1989, after Khomeini's fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie to be killed for apostasy, Egyptian theologian Omar Abdul-Rahman told a journalist that if Mahfouz had been punished for writing his novel, Rushdie would not have dared publish the Satanic Verses. Sheikh Omar has always maintained that this he was not calling for Mahfouz to be killed, but in 1994 Islamic extremists, believing that he was, attempted to assassinate the 82-year-old novelist by stabbing him in the neck outside his Cairo home. He survived, permanently affected by damage to nerves in his right hand. Subsequently, he lived under constant bodyguard protection. Finally, in the beginning of 2006, the novel was published in Egypt with a preface written by Ahmad Kamal Abu Almajd. Due to his outspoken support for Sadat's Camp David peace treaty with Israel, his books were banned in many Arab countries until after he won the Nobel prize.
David Grossman is an Israeli author of fiction, nonfiction, and youth and children's literature, whose books have been translated into numerous languages. The Yellow Wind, his incisive nonfiction work on the Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, met with acclaim abroad and sparked dialogue and controversy at home. Grossman studied philosophy and theater at Hebrew University. He worked as a correspondent and radio actor for Kol Israel, Israel's state radio service. He was one of the presenters of Cat in a Sack, a children's program that was broadcast from 1970 to 1984,. Along with Dani Eldar, he ran the popular absurdist radio series, Stutz (Yiddish: "that can happen"). In 1984, Grossman won the Prime Minister's Prize for Creative Work.
Recommended Books

The Palestine-Israeli Conflict: A Beginner's Guide, Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Dawoud El-Alami (One World Press – 2002). Dual Narrative side by side history of Palestinian-Israeli conflict showing the very grey areas and nuanced perspectives with out judgment.
One Palestine, Complete, Tom Segev (Metropolitan Books, 2000). Readable history providing intimate portraits of many of the neighbors and participants -- Jewish and Arab -- who have struggled in the conflict amongst Palestinians and Jews.
The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, edited by Shlaim and Rogen (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Essays by Palestinian, Jewish and other historians regarding the conflict over the land of Israel/Palestine.
Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land (Revised), David K. Shipler. (Penguin Press 2002). Pulitzer prize winning NY Times author David Shipler provides a broad multiperspective understanding of the modern conflict with specific detail about the people and places of Palestine and Israel.
The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem: 1947-1949, Benny Morris (Cambridge University Press, 1989) and, for a more dense look at the period from the end of the Ottoman Empire to the present, Righteous Victims (Knopf, 2001) by Benny Morris.
Journalism/Essays, Prose and Poetry on the Middle East
A window into the mindset of Palestinians and Israelis through often lyrical, passionate, and disturbing writings.
"Children of Gebelawi" - Naguib Mahfouz
"The Selected Poetry of Yehudah Amichai" - Bloch and Mitchell
"I Saw Ramallah" by Mourid Barghouti
"The Adam of Two Edens: Selected Poems" or "Psalms: Poems" by Mahmoud Darwish, Poet/Activist
"Yellow Wind" and "Sleeping on A Wire" by David Grossman
"The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist" - Emile Habiby
"The Vocabulary of Peace - Life, Culture and Politics in the Middle East" - Shulamith Hareven
"Drinking the Sea at Gaza" - Amira Hass, Ha'aretz reporter, daughter of Holocaust survivors who lives in Gaza
"Wild Thorns" - Sahar Khalifeh
"Out of Place" and "The End of the Peace Process" - Edward Said
"Arabesques" - Anton Shammas