Book Description
This important volume rethinks the conventional parameters of Middle East studies through attention to popular cultural forms, producers, and communities of consumers. The volume has a broad historical scope, ranging from the late Ottoman period to the second Palestinian uprising, with a focus on cultural forms and processes in Israel, Palestine, and the refugee camps of the Arab Middle East. The contributors consider how Palestinian and Israeli popular culture influences and is influenced by political, economic, social, and historical processes in the region. At the same time, they follow the circulation of Palestinian and Israeli cultural commodities and imaginations across borders and checkpoints and within the global marketplace.

The volume is interdisciplinary, including the work of anthropologists, historians, sociologists, political scientists, ethnomusicologists, and Americanist and literary studies scholars. Contributors examine popular music of the Palestinian resistance, ethno-racial “passing” in Israeli cinema, Arab-Jewish rock, Euro-Israeli tourism to the Arab Middle East, Internet communities in the Palestinian diaspora, café culture in early-twentieth-century Jerusalem, and more. Together, they suggest new ways of conceptualizing Palestinian and Israeli political culture.

Contributors. Livia Alexander, Carol Bardenstein, Elliott Colla, Amy Horowitz, Laleh Khalili, Mary Layoun, Mark LeVine, Joseph Massad, Melani McAlister, Ilan Pappé, Rebecca L. Stein, Ted Swedenburg, Salim Tamari ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

An excellent book on Israel/Palestine
rather than focus oh names & dates and the usual fare, this book is a great resource on Israel/Palestine and gives you information hard to find elsewhere, whether it is an analysis of Joe Sacco's artwork, Palestinian films, or a look back in time to the old city of Jerusalem pre-Brittish mandate. A must read!

A terrifically thought-provoking collection of essays!
Thisbook contains some of the very best scholarship currently available on the cultural politics of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Carol Bardenstein's essay on the implications of cross-casting and "passing" in Israeli and Palestinian films alone is worth the price of admission!

Disgusting
Sure, there's plenty of fascinating material on Levantine popular culture in this book.But I think that too much of it is simply a disgusting paean to racist attacks on human rights, with sneering taunts directed at any attempts by Israelis to protect their rights.

Yes, there are discussions of Israelis being thrilled by the prospect of finally being allowed to visit nearby Petra, on the Jordanian side of the border.And there is even an admission that it is "preposterous" for an Egyptian video to imply that European Jews "deserved to suffer genocide" and that Arab suffering is the result "of Jewish existence."

Yes, there's quite a bit of material that a scholar could find useful.And there has to be a place even for books that support racism and attack human rights.But the place for my copy of this one is my trash can. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies, published by Irish University Review on March 22, 2003. The length of the article is 1117 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine. (Book Reviews).(Book Review)
Author: Conor McCarthy
Publication: Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 2003
Publisher: Irish University Review
Volume: 33Issue: 1Page: 225(3)

Article Type: Book Review

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Book Description
The dream of building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land has long been a quintessential part of English identity and culture: but how did this vision shape the Victorian encounter with the actual Jerusalem in the Middle East?The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917 offers a new cultural history of the English fascination with Palestine in the long nineteenth century, from Napoleon's failed Mediterranean campaign of 1799, which marked a new era in the British involvement in the land, to Allenby's conquest of Jerusalem in 1917. Bar-Yosef argues that the Protestant tradition of internalizing Biblical vocabulary - 'Promised Land', 'Chosen People', 'Jerusalem' - and applying it to different, often contesting, visions of England and Englishness evoked a unique sense of ambivalence towards the imperial desire to possess the Holy Land. Popular religious culture, in other words, was crucial to the construction of the orientalist discourse: so crucial, in fact, that metaphorical appropriations of the 'Holy Land' played a much more dominant role in the English cultural imagination than the actual Holy Land itself.As it traces the diversity of 'Holy Lands' in the Victorian cultural landscape - literal and metaphorical, secular and sacred, radical and patriotic, visual and textual - this study joins the ongoing debate about the dissemination of imperial ideology. Drawing on a wide array of sources, from Sunday-school textbooks and popular exhibitions to penny magazines and soldiers' diaries, the book demonstrates how the Orientalist discourse functions - or, to be more precise, malfunctions - in those popular cultural spheres that are so markedly absent from Edward Said's work: it is only by exploring sources that go beyond the highbrow, the academic, or the official, that we can begin to grasp the limited currency of the orientalist discourse in the metropolitan centre, and the different meanings it could hold for different social groups. As such, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917 provides a significant contribution to both postcolonial studies and English social history. ... Read more

Book Description
Challenges prevailing assumptions about family, courts of law, and the nature of modernity in Muslim societies against the backdrop of Haifa and Jaffa during " the long nineteenth century."

The popular image of the family and the court of law in Muslim societies is one of traditional, unchanging social frameworks. Iris Agmon suggests an entirely different view, grounded in a detailed study of nineteenth-century Ottoman court records from the flourishing Palestinian port cities of Haifa and Jaffa. She depicts the shari'a Muslim court of law as a dynamic institution, capable of adapting to rapid and profound social changes - indeed, of playing an active role in generating these changes. Court and family interact and transform themselves, each other, and the society of which they form part.

Agmon's book is a significant contribution to scholarship on both family history and legal culture in the social history of the Middle East. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Art Journal, published by College Art Association on September 22, 2006. The length of the article is 2121 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The contested terrain of popular culture.(Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture)(Book review)
Author: Sarah Rogers
Publication: Art Journal (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 22, 2006
Publisher: College Art Association
Volume: 65Issue: 3Page: 117(3)

Article Type: Book review

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Book Description
Articles on the religious, political, and social lives of the Jews, Christians, and pagans living in Palestine during the early centuries of the first millennium. ... Read more

Book Description
Examines gender, women's involvement, and sexuality in the ideologies and strategies of a transnational Palestinian political movement.

This book focuses on the central party apparatus of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the Democratic Front (DF) branches established in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Jordan in the 1970s, and the most influential and innovative of the DF women's organizations: the Palestinian Federation of Women's Action Committees in the occupied territories. Until now, no study of a Palestinian political organization has so thoroughly engaged with internal gender histories. In addition, no other work attempts to systematically compare branches in different regional locations to explain those differences.

Students of gender and Middle East studies, especially those with a specialty in Palestinian studies, will find this work to be of critical importance. This book will also be of great interest to those working on political protest movements and factional ties. ... Read more

Book Description
By analyzing key aspects of Hebrew culture, this book adds new dimension to the anthropological, sociological, and historical studies dealing with folklore, rituals, and festivals. ... Read more

Book Description
Examines processes of social reproduction, survival, and social mobility amid Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

This groundbreaking volume takes a deliberate look at how entire households, families, and individuals "cope," negotiate their lives, and achieve personal and collective goals in Occupied Palestine. Contributors raise critical questions about tradition vs. modernity and the sociocultural consequences of emigration. Living Palestine establishes that household dynamics (i.e., kin-based marriage, fertility decisions, children's education, and living arrangements) cannot be fully grasped unless linked to the traumas of the past and worries of the present.

Likewise, family strategies for survival and social mobility under occupation are swept up in the tide of history that engulfs the world in which Palestinians live and struggle as individuals, households, and as a society. Living Palestine is drawn from an expansive 1999 research project of the Institute for Women's Studies at Birzeit University in which two thousand households in nineteen communities were surveyed with an aim to examining the Palestinian household from multiple perspectives. ... Read more

Book Description
Music is an essential component of all cultures. It conveys instruction, expresses emotion, and is used for teaching and recreational purposes. Without a doubt, music functioned in these capacities in ancient Israel. Although scholars rarely discuss the role of music in Israel's history and culture, recent studies have demonstrated that understanding Israel's music greatly contributes to our knowledge of the culture of ancient Israel/Palestine. Do You Hear What I Hear? examines the use of music and musical instruments in the ancient Israel and Palestine. By taking a close look at some of the enigmatic and under-researched subjects of ancient music, Burgh discusses ways in which the study of music can help us understand daily life in ancient Israel better.

Presently, the available collection of musical artifacts from Israel/Palestine dates from 10,000 BCE-4th century CE and numbers over 300 items. While focusing on Iron Age Israel/Palestine (1200-586 BCE), Do You Hear What I Hear? uses many of these artifacts, which come from various regions, and draws on examples from surrounding Near Eastern cultures. Burgh uses plaque figurines, figurines in the round, and instrumental remains as well as line drawings of musical activity found on ceramic vessels and walls of buildings to examine music in the ancient Near East.

Burgh takes the available musical data and explores how, where, and why music played a part in the lives of those living in ancient Israel/Palestine. His book clearly demonstrates that for the people of this region and time music was an organic, evolving mode of communication that often reflected how they understood life and navigated the world around them. Do You Hear What I Hear? suggests that we listen closely and unassumingly to the artifacts and texts in order to hear what they may tell us about past lifeways. ... Read more