Recent Publications

Prepared with assistance from Haley Clasen (HC), Jeffrey Coltman-Cormier (JCC), and Claire Trilling (CT).

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ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT

Cracks in the Wall: Beyond Apartheid in Palestine/Israel, by Ben White. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 208 pages. $14. In this study, journalist Ben White writes about the changing dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with particular attention to what he sees as the increasing opposition to Israeli policies in the West. The book focuses on how the fragmentation of the American Jewish views on Israel/Palestine and the transformation of the conflict into a partisan issue in the United States has occurred at the same time as the strengthening of global calls to boycott Israel and of Palestinian grassroots resistance movements. White argues that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 served as a catalyst for all these processes, degrading uncritical support for Israel while increasing knowledge of and sympathy with the Palestinian cause. The book finishes by offering the solution of a single democratic state in Israel/Palestine as the best outcome for all parties. (CT)

IRAN

Psycho-Nationalism: Global Thought, Iranian Imaginations, by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 170 pages. $24.99. This book by philosopher Arshin Adib-Moghaddam probes the relationships between states, citizens, and national identities, particularly as revealed through analysis of Iran. Adib-Moghaddam formulates the concept of psycho-nationalism, or the utilization by a state of nationalist ideas, narratives, and symbols to psychologically manipulate people into willingly accepting its claim to legitimacy and rule. Contrary to the common historiographical assumption that nationalism originated in modern Europe, Adib-Moghaddam dates the concept of an Iranian national identity to ancient times. However, its relevance has been intensely pronounced since the 1979 revolution as Iranian governments have wielded psycho-nationalist tools to delineate between “legitimate” citizens and “illegitimate” dissidents. Psycho-Nationalism aims to extract broad lessons from Iran about nationalism so as to reckon with its growing manifestations in today’s globalizing world of flourishing communication technologies. (JCC)

ISRAEL

Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture, by Smadar Lavie. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. 314 pages. $30. Anthropologist Smadar Lavie explores the political situation surrounding the 2003 Single Mothers’ March and the Knafoland protests in Jerusalem that brought global attention to the struggles of single Mizrahi mothers in Israel. Writing in part from personal experience, Lavie writes about Israel’s Mizrahi Jews (i.e., those with roots in the Arab and Muslim world) by focusing on the intersectionality of racial, socioeconomic, and gender barriers that Mizrahi single mothers face when interacting with the government. She argues that these women’s interaction with the Israeli government constitutes a form of torture, as they love the Jewish state as an ideal and depend on it for daily survival but are repeatedly failed by its austerity-driven welfare cuts, its byzantine bureaucracy, and the racism or apathy of its politicians. Refusing to isolate the issue, Lavie explores how the racism and sexism impacting the lives of Mizrahi women fit more generally into Israeli politics and society as well as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (CT)

LEBANON

Faith and Resistance: The Politics of Love and War in Lebanon, by Sarah Marusek. London: Pluto Press, 2018. 240 pages. $36. Incorporating fieldwork and drawing on Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism, the University of Johannesburg’s Sarah Marusek explores religion’s capacity for radical activism in Lebanon. In Faith and Resistance, Marusek claims that the legacy of Western colonialism elevates secularism as the baseline that all other forms of putatively inferior knowledge, including religion, are compared to. In this context, Islamic religious charities challenge colonialism by primarily centering their own, rather than exclusively Western, formulations of religious thought and by struggling against political, religious, and economic oppression. Although the organizations’ commitments are tainted by social divisions, regional conflicts, and the corrupting effects of power, Marusek highlights them as examples of religious resistance. (JCC)

SYRIA

Bayt Farhi and the Sephardic Palaces of Ottoman Damascus in the Late 18th and 19th Centuries, by Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis. Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2018. 336 pages. $89.95. In this photographic coffee-table...