This Is Jerusalem Calling: State Radio in Mandate Palestine

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments This project was a pleasure from beginning to end. I am deeply grateful to the many people and institutions who helped bring this project to life—starting with former Palestine Broadcasting Service Assistant Director Rex Keating, whose memoirs were my first indication that mandate-era radio in Palestine might be a subject worth investigating. During my years of research, the staff at numerous archives went out of their way to track down archival files and suggest additional materials . Debbie Usher of St. Antony’s Middle East Center Archive welcomed a very green researcher with warmth, tea, and numerous useful tips for future searches. At the Israel State Archives, Michal Saft was particularly kind, cheerfully accommodating everything from a tight travel schedule to a loud digital camera. Staff at the British Library and the British National Archives (formerly the Public Records Office) were equally helpful. The microfilm room staff at both New York and Columbia Universities charitably overlooked my hogging the super-highresolution magnifying lenses as well as my tendency to cart enough bags into their rooms to make it appear as if I might move in permanently. Other people helped in less direct ways. Eddie Palmer opened the door to a rich archival treasure trove—the Boutagy family collection of photographs, papers, and family memoirs, as well as the Boutagy family website. Kevin Martin sent chapters of his dissertation on modernity in 1950s Syria for comparative purposes. They also proved a rich source of inspiration, for which I am grateful. Amos Nadan sent relevant portions of his then-manuscript—those dealing with agricultural programming on the PBS—which helped flesh out the tricky issue of audience response (or lack thereof) to this programming. Relli Shechter helped re- fine my thinking on advertising, as did Victoria de Grazia. Sherene Seikaly welcomed me as a fellow sojourner at the Israeli State Archive and viii “This Is Jerusalem Calling” uttered my favorite characterization of academic work: “This is hard.” Kira von Ostenfeld, Jon Webster, and Kristen Brainard provided good company in New York, while Andrew Tabler, Melody Russell, and Kristin Shamas, as well as Habib Battah, Charles Chuman, and Tsolin Nalbantian did the same in Damascus and Beirut. Ted Kerr has been a constant fount of encouragement in Denver. Several organizations kindly provided venues to present chapters in paper form: the annual Middle East Studies Association (MESA) conference ; the annual American Historical Association (AHA) conference ; the World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies (WOCMES); the Roger Williams University Conference on Religion and the State; and the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies’ (CAMES) faculty and visiting scholars’ research seminar at the American University of Beirut. The questions, comments and suggestions that audience members and participants made at these conferences and seminars added depth and richness to the research that went into this project. Similarly, I would like to thank Salim Tamari for publishing an excerpt of Chapter 1 in the Jerusalem Quarterly’s 50th anniversary issue, and the University of Texas Press for granting permission to do so. During the research for this project, I was a grateful recipient of much Columbia University funding: a multi-year fellowship and summer funds that the History Department provided, a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ (GSAS) Reid Hall research grant and a Middle East Institute summer regional travel research grant. The Department of Education supported my language training with an academic year and summer FLAS. I appreciated the financial support that each grant provided, and was grateful for the ‘vote of confidence’ in my work that each represented. I would also like to thank the History Department, GSAS and Middle East Institute staff—particularly the inestimable Astrid Benedek. As this book grew out of my doctoral dissertation, I am most grateful for the intellectual support that Richard Bulliet, Rashid Khalidi and Anupama Rao provided during my days in graduate school. They suggested avenues of conceptualizing and problematizing ‘radio’ as a subject that would never have occurred to me and showed me the forest whenever I became too bogged down in the many trees of this project. They asked questions about radio technology, commodity culture, listening practices, audience reception and how the PBS intersected with mandate politics that opened up new ways of thinking about the material I uncovered. Acknowledgments ix I would also like to thank two ‘families’: my own family—my parents Darlene and Jerry, sister Brianna and...