Toward the end of the twentieth century, an unprecedented surge of writing altered the Israeli literary scene in profound ways. As fresh creative voices and multiple languages vied for recognition, diversity replaced consensus. Genres once accorded lower status—such as the graphic novel and science fiction—gained readership and positive critical notice. These trends ushered in not only the discovery and recovery of literary works but also a major rethinking of literary history. In Since 1948: Is...
Aug 12, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast An interview with Professor Shenhav in which the politics of translation is discussed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies
Aug 07, 2024•41 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast In A History of the Hasmonean State: Josephus and Beyond (T&T Clark, 2019), Kenneth Atkinson tells the exciting story of the nine decades of the Hasmonean rule of Judea (152 - 63 BCE) by going beyond the accounts of the Hasmoneans in Josephus in order to bring together new evidence to reconstruct how the Hasmonean family transformed their kingdom into a state that lasted until the arrival of the Romans. Atkinson reconstructs the relationships between the Hasmonean state and the rulers of the Sel...
Aug 07, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Ep 542•Transcript available on Metacast Cairo's synagogues shed new light on the transformation Egyptian society and its Jewish community underwent from 1875 to the present. Sacred Places Tell Tales: Jewish Life and Heritage in Modern Cairo (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) is the previously untold history of Egyptian Jewry and the ways in which Cairo's synagogues historically functioned as active institutions in the social lives of these Jews. Historian Yoram Meital interprets Cairo's synagogues as exquisite storytellers. The synagogues s...
Aug 04, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep 536•Transcript available on Metacast Traces of Enayat (Transit Books, 2023) is a work of creative nonfiction tracing the mysterious life and erasure of Egyptian literature’s tragic heroine. It begins in Cairo, 1963. Four years before her lone novel is finally published, the writer Enayat al-Zayyat takes her own life at age 27. For the next three decades, it’s as if Enayat never existed at all. Years later, when celebrated Egyptian poet Iman Mersal stumbles upon Enayat’s long-forgotten Love and Silence in a Cairo book stall, she emb...
Aug 03, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep 258•Transcript available on Metacast By examining the intersection of Islamic law, state law, religion, and culture in the Egyptian nation-building process, Recasting Islamic Law: Religion and the Nation State in Egyptian Constitution Making (Cornell University Press, 2021) highlights how the sharia, when attached to constitutional commitments, is reshaped into modern Islamic state law. Dr. Rachel M. Scott analyses the complex effects of constitutional commitments to the sharia in the wake of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. She ar...
Aug 03, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep 338•Transcript available on Metacast For Kahane, the greatest enemy of the Jews was not the black nationalist, the greatest enemy of the Jews was not the Arabs. The greatest enemy of the Jews was liberalism. Shaul Magid, Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and Rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue, is a celebrated and brilliant scholar of radical and dissident Judaism in America. He joins John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard to discuss his book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an...
Aug 01, 2024•55 min•Ep 131•Transcript available on Metacast In the 2010s, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) began to mobilize an international media system to project Turkey as a rising player and counter foreign criticism of its authoritarian practices. In Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order (University of Illinois Press, 2024), Bilge Yesil examines the AKP’s English-language communication apparatus, focusing on its objectives and outcomes, the idea-generating framework t...
Jul 28, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 282•Transcript available on Metacast Russia's forceful re-entry into the Middle Eastern arena, and the accentuated continuity of Soviet policy and methods of the 1960s and '70s, highlight the topicality of this groundbreaking study, which confirms the USSR's role in shaping Middle Eastern and global history. The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR's Military Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict (Oxford UP, 2017) covers the peak of the USSR's direct military involvement in the Egyptian-Israeli conflict. The head-on clas...
Jul 28, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Ep 1461•Transcript available on Metacast How did ordinary Iraqis survive the occupation of their communities by the Islamic State? How did they decide whether to stay or flee, to cooperate or resist? Based on an original survey from Baghdad alongside key interviews in the field Surviving the Islamic State: Contention, Cooperation, and Neutrality in Wartime Iraq (Columbia University Press, 2024) offers an insightful account of how Iraqis in different areas of the country responded to the rise and fall of the Islamic State. Dr. Austin J....
Jul 26, 2024•54 min•Ep 281•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Richard Bulliet talks about his work in world and Islamicate history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies
Jul 24, 2024•43 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast The Persian Gulf has long been a contested space--an object of imperial ambitions, national antagonisms, and migratory dreams. The roots of these contestations lie in the different ways the Gulf has been defined as a region, both by those who live there and those beyond its shore. Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East (Stanford UP, 2024) reveals how capitalism, empire-building, geopolitics, and urbanism have each shaped understandings of the region over the last...
Jul 21, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep 85•Transcript available on Metacast In recent decades, the study of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium, has been revolutionized by new approaches and more sophisticated models for how its society and state operated. No longer looked upon as a pale facsimile of classical Rome, Byzantium is now considered a vigorous state of its own, inheritor of many of Rome's features, and a vital node in the first truly globalized world. The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (Oxford UP, 2024) is the first full, single-author...
Jul 20, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep 1458•Transcript available on Metacast “Stories of archives are always stories of phantoms, of the death or disappearance or erasure of something, the preservation of what remains, and its possible reappearance—feared by some, desired by others,” writes Thomas Keenan. Archiving the Commons: Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma (DPR Barcelona, June 2024) is about those stories and much more. Özge Çelikaslan uses bak.ma, a digital media archive born out of the social movements in Turkey, to guide us through a journey in which archives be...
Jul 19, 2024•40 min•Ep 63•Transcript available on Metacast In this very moving and heartwarming interview I had the opportunity to discuss with Fida Jiyris her work, a beautifully written memoir that tells the story of her and her family journey, which is also the story of Palestine, from the Nakba to the present—a seventy-five-year tale of conflict, exodus, occupation, return and search for belonging, seen through the eyes of one writer and her family. Fida reveals how her father, Sabri, a PLO leader and advisor to Yasser Arafat, chose exile in 1970 be...
Jul 18, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep 280•Transcript available on Metacast How the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center informed the PLO's relationship to Zionism and Israel In September 1982, the Israeli military invaded West Beirut and Israel-allied Lebanese militiamen massacred Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Meanwhile, Israeli forces also raided the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center and trucked its complete library to Israel. Palestinian activists and supporters protested loudly to international organizations and th...
Jul 15, 2024•28 min•Ep 101•Transcript available on Metacast How is foreign policy made in Iraq? Based on dozens of interviews with senior officials and politicians, The Making of Foreign Policy in Iraq: Political Factions and the Ruling Elite (Bloomsbury, 2021) provides a clear analysis of the development of domestic Iraqi politics since 2003. Dr. Zana Gul explains how the federal government of Iraq and Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) have functioned and worked together since toppling Saddam to reveal in granular detail the complexity of their foreig...
Jul 13, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep 279•Transcript available on Metacast Before 2010, there were no Israeli horror films. Then distinctly Israeli serial killers, zombies, vampires, and ghosts invaded local screens. The next decade saw a blossoming of the genre by young Israeli filmmakers. New Israeli Horror: Local Cinema, Global Genre (Rutgers UP, 2024) is the first book to tell their story. Through in-depth analysis, engaging storytelling, and interviews with the filmmakers, Olga Gershenson explores their films from inception to reception. She shows how these films ...
Jul 13, 2024•47 min•Ep 202•Transcript available on Metacast Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2023) focuses on the intersections of three entities otherwise deemed marginal in historical scholarship: the Jazira region, the borderlands of today’s Iraq, Syria, and Turkey; the mobile peoples within this region, from nomadic pastoralists to deportees and refugees; and locusts. Sam Dolbee’s research traces the movements of people and insects within this region, and how the social “problem” of mobile pe...
Jul 12, 2024•47 min•Ep 38•Transcript available on Metacast Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, Maya Wind shatters this myth by documenting how Israeli universities are directly complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights. In Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso, 2024) shows, Wind argues that Israeli universities serve as pillars of Israel's sys...
Jul 12, 2024•49 min•Ep 278•Transcript available on Metacast Judaism in the twenty-first century has seen the rise of the messianic Third Temple movement, as religious activists based in Israel have worked to realize biblical prophecies, including the restoration of a Jewish theocracy and the construction of the third and final Temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Through groundbreaking ethnographic research, Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age: Jews, Noahides, and the Third Temple Imaginary (Rutgers University Press, 2024), Rachel Z. Feldman details how ...
Jul 09, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep 527•Transcript available on Metacast The Hellenistic period was a pivotal moment in the history of the Jewish priesthood. The waning days of the Persian empire coincided with the continued ascendance of the high priest and Jerusalem temple as powerful political, cultural, and religious institutions in Judea. The Aramaic Scrolls from Qumran, only recently published in full, testify to the existence of a flourishing but previously unknown Jewish literary tradition dating from the end of Persian rule to the rise of the Hasmoneans. In ...
Jul 08, 2024•52 min•Ep 526•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, I talk to Samuel Dolbee, Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His book, Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2023). In this highly original environmental history, Samuel Dolbee sheds new light on borders and state formation by following locusts and revealing how they shaped both the environment and people's imaginations from the late Ottoman Empire to the Second World War. Drawing on a wide ...
Jul 03, 2024•56 min•Ep 277•Transcript available on Metacast Media studies is an emerging discipline that is quickly making an impact within the wider field of biblical scholarship. The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ancient Media Culture (Brill, 2023) is designed to evaluate the status quaestionis of the Dead Sea Scrolls as products of an ancient media culture, with leading scholars in the Dead Sea Scrolls and related disciplines reviewing how scholarship has addressed issues of ancient media in the past, assessing the use of media criticism in current research, an...
Jul 01, 2024•1 hr 28 min•Ep 2023•Transcript available on Metacast In Jerusalem, as World War II was coming to an end, an extraordinary circle of friends began to meet at the bar of the King David Hotel. This group of aspiring artists, writers, and intellectuals—among them Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Sally Kassab, Walid Khalidi, and Rasha Salam, some of whom would go on to become acclaimed authors, scholars, and critics—came together across religious lines in a fleeting moment of possibility within a troubled history. What brought these Muslim, ...
Jun 29, 2024•54 min•Ep 276•Transcript available on Metacast Today I talked to James Montgomery, one of the translators of The Philosopher Responds: An Intellectual Correspondence from the Tenth Century, two volumes (NYU Press, 2019 and 2022). About the book: Why is laughter contagious? Why do mountains exist? Why do we long for the past, even if it is scarred by suffering? Spanning a vast array of subjects that range from the philosophical to the theological, from the philological to the scientific, The Philosopher Responds is the record of a set of ques...
Jun 26, 2024•1 hr 28 min•Ep 216•Transcript available on Metacast Today I talked to Peter Hill about his new book Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East (Oneworld Academic, 2024). In 1813, high in the Lebanese mountains, a thirteen-year-old boy watches a solar eclipse. Will it foretell a war, a plague, the death of a prince? Mikha’il Mishaqa’s lifelong search for truth starts here. Soon he’s reading Newtonian science and the radical ideas of Voltaire and Volney: he loses his religion, turning away from the Catholic Churc...
Jun 26, 2024•39 min•Ep 275•Transcript available on Metacast A Primer for Teaching Indian Ocean World History: Ten Design Principles (Duke UP, 2024) is a guide for college and high school educators who are teaching Indian Ocean histories for the first time or who want to reinvigorate their courses. It can also serve those who are training future teachers to prepare their own syllabi as well as those who want to incorporate Indian Ocean histories into their world history courses. Edward A. Alpers and Thomas F. McDow offer course design principles that will...
Jun 25, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Ep 84•Transcript available on Metacast For a brief moment in the history of Acre, there was a Hebrew community that linked old and new settlements. It had a national-Zionist orientation and consisted of Jews of local and Mizrachic origin. This community is no longer visible in the cityscape, and its history has disappeared from the collective Zionist memory - but it played a role in building the Jewish national community in Palestine. The unusual history of Acre shows how it succeeded in attracting new, nationalist settlers. Anat Kid...
Jun 18, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep 519•Transcript available on Metacast Nahj al-Balagha is among the most powerful, consequential, and linguistically brilliant masterpieces of Arabic and of Islamic thought and literature. Based on the orations, letters, and sayings of wisdom of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib (d. 661), the first Imam or successor to Prophet Muhammad in Shi‘i Islam and the fourth caliph in Sunni Islam, this oral treasure was compiled and brought together as a text by the late tenth/early eleventh scholar and poet Al-Sharif al-Radi (d. 1015). In this episode I spe...
Jun 17, 2024•2 hr 44 min•Ep 334•Transcript available on Metacast 
