Title: Speak, bird, speak again: Palestinian Arab folktales 
Author: Muhawi, Ibrahim 1937-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Anthropology | Literature in Translation | Middle Eastern Studies | Folklore and Mythology
Publisher's Description: Were it simply a collection of fascinating, previously unpublished folktales, Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales would merit praise and attention because of its cultural rather than political approach to Palestinian studies. But it is much more than this. By combining their respective expertise in English literature and anthropology, Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana bring to these tales an integral method of study that unites a sensitivity to language with a deep appreciation for culture.As native Palestinians, the authors are well-suited to their task. Over the course of several years they collected tales in the regions of the Galilee, Gaza, and the West Bank, determining which were the most widely known and appreciated and selecting the ones that best represented the Palestinian Arab folk narrative tradition. Great care has been taken with the translations to maintain the original flavor, humor, and cultural nuances of tales that are at once earthy and whimsical. The authors have also provided footnotes, an international typology, a comprehensive motif index, and a thorough analytic guide to parallel tales in the larger Arab tradition in folk narrative. Speak, Bird, Speak Again is an essential guide to Palestinian culture and a must for those who want to deepen their understanding of a troubled, enduring people.   [brief]
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Title: Three mothers, three daughters: Palestinian women's stories 
Author: Gorkin, Michael
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Women's Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: This remarkable collection of oral histories from six Palestinian women, three mothers and three of their daughters, affords an unparalleled view into the daily lives of women who have lived, and continue to live, through a turbulent and rapidly changing era. In recording these stories, Michael Gorkin and Rafiqa Othman have preserved each woman's distinctive voice, capturing in vivid and moving detail a broad range of experience - everything from recollections of native villages to an account of incarceration as a political prisoner. Highly personal events such as courting, marriage, and childbirth are interwoven with memories of upheavals such as the wars of 1948 and 1967. The women speak with surprising candor about conflicts between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, men and women, Arabs and Jews. These beautifully written narratives bear witness to the power of Palestinian culture in sustaining the often difficult lives of women. The book also provides brilliant testimony to the experience of living in the midst of the Arab-Israeli conflict.Michael Gorkin, a Jewish-American psychologist who lives in Israel, and Rafiqa Othman, a Palestinian special education teacher, have collected the narratives from different cultural and geographic locations within the boundaries of historical Palestine - including East Jerusalem, a refugee camp on the West Bank, and an Arab village within Israel. With surprising intimacy, the mothers and daughters discuss their views about sex, marriage, and child-rearing; ideas about themselves and their relationship to God, their families, and their homeland; and questions of shame, devotion, freedom, and honor.In the preface, introduction and epilogue, Gorkin and Othman frame the stories and describe the project. The linked stories of mothers and daughters attest to the profound changes that have occurred in the lives of Palestinian women during this century - in the areas of education, work, political involvement and personal freedom. In addition to delineating this astonishing historical and cultural transformation, the stories create lasting images of the people these women have loved and hated, the pleasures they have enjoyed, the dangers they have survived, and the hopes they continue to cherish.   [brief]
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Title: Birthing the nation: strategies of Palestinian women in Israel
Author: Kanaaneh, Rhoda Ann
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Women's Studies | Medical Anthropology | Sociology | Postcolonial Studies | Middle Eastern History | Sociology | Postcolonial Studies | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: In this rich, evocative study, Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh examines the changing notions of sexuality, family, and reproduction among Palestinians living in Israel. Distinguishing itself amid the media maelstrom that has homogenized Palestinians as "terrorists," this important new work offers a complex, nuanced, and humanized depiction of a group rendered invisible despite its substantial size, now accounting for nearly twenty percent of Israel's population. Groundbreaking and thought-provoking, Birthing the Nation contextualizes the politics of reproduction within contemporary issues affecting Palestinians, and places these issues against the backdrop of a dominant Israeli society.   [brief]
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Title: Comrades and enemies: Arab and Jewish workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 
Author: Lockman, Zachary
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: In Comrades and Enemies Zachary Lockman explores the mutually formative interactions between the Arab and Jewish working classes, labor movements, and worker-oriented political parties in Palestine just before and during the period of British colonial rule. Unlike most of the historical and sociological literature on Palestine in this period, Comrades and Enemies avoids treating the Arab and Jewish communities as if they developed independently of each other. Instead of focusing on politics, diplomacy, or military history, Lockman draws on detailed archival research in both Arabic and Hebrew, and on interviews with activists, to delve into the country's social, economic, and cultural history, showing how Arab and Jewish societies in Palestine helped to shape each other in significant ways. Comrades and Enemies presents a narrative of Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine that extends and complicates the conventional story of primordial identities, total separation, and unremitting conflict while going beyond both Zionist and Palestinian nationalist mythologies and paradigms of interpretation.   [brief]
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Title: Land, labor and the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 1882-1914
Author: Shafir, Gershon
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: Gershon Shafir challenges the heroic myths about the foundation of the State of Israel by investigating the struggle to control land and labor during the early Zionist enterprise. He argues that it was not the imported Zionist ideas that were responsible for the character of the Israeli state, but t . . . [more]
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Title: Intimate enemies: Jews and Arabs in a shared land
Author: Benvenisti, Meron 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Politics | Middle Eastern Studies | Jewish Studies | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: As Israelis and Palestinians negotiate separation and division of their land, Meron Benvenisti, former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, maintains that any expectations for "peaceful partition" are doomed. In his brave and controversial new book, he raises the possibility of a confederation of Israel/Palestine, the only solution that he feels will bring lasting peace.The seven million people in the territory between Jordan and the Mediterranean are mutually dependent regarding employment, water, land use, ecology, transportation, and all other spheres of human activity. Each side, Benvenisti says, must accept the reality that two national entities are living within one geopolitical entity - their conflict is intercommunal and will not be resolved by population transfers or land partition.A geographer and historian by training, a man passionately rooted in his homeland, Benvenisti skillfully conveys the perspective of both Israeli and Palestinian communities. He recognizes the great political and ideological resistance to a confederation, but argues that there are Israeli Jews and Palestinians who can envision an undivided land, where attachment to a common homeland is stronger than militant tribalism and segregation in national ghettos. Acknowledging that equal coexistence between Israeli and Palestinian may yet be an impossible dream, he insists that such a dream deserves a place in the current negotiations."Meron Benvenisti is the Middle East expert to whom Middle East experts go for advice . . . the most oft-quoted and oft-damned analyst in Israel." - from the Foreword by Thomas L. Friedman   [brief]
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Title: Sacred landscape: the buried history of the Holy Land since 1948
Author: Benvenisti, Meron 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Religion | Middle Eastern Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: As a young man Meron Benvenisti often accompanied his father, a distinguished geographer, when the elder Benvenisti traveled through the Holy Land charting a Hebrew map that would rename Palestinian sites and villages with names linked to Israel's ancestral homeland. These experiences in Benvenisti's youth are central to this book, and the story that he tells helps explain how during this century an Arab landscape, physical and human, was transformed into an Israeli, Jewish state.Benvenisti first discusses the process by which new Hebrew nomenclature replaced the Arabic names of more than 9,000 natural features, villages, and ruins in Eretz Israel/Palestine (his name for the Holy Land, thereby defining it as a land of Jews and Arabs). He then explains how the Arab landscape has been transformed through war, destruction, and expulsion into a flourishing Jewish homeland accommodating millions of immigrants. The resulting encounters between two peoples who claim the same land have raised great moral and political dilemmas, which Benvenisti presents with candor and impartiality.Benvenisti points out that five hundred years after the Moors left Spain there are sufficient landmarks remaining to preserve the outlines of Muslim Spain. Even with sustained modern development, the ancient scale is still visible. Yet a Palestinian returning to his ancestral landscape after only fifty years would have difficulty identifying his home. Furthermore, Benvenisti says, the transformation of Arab cultural assets into Jewish holy sites has engendered a struggle over the "signposts of memory" essential to both peoples. Sacred Landscape raises troublesome questions that most writers on the Middle East avoid. The now-buried Palestinian landscape remains a symbol and a battle standard for Palestinians and Israelis. But it is Benvenisti's continuing belief that Eretz Israel/Palestine has enough historical and physical space for the people of both nations and that it can one day be a shared homeland.   [brief]
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Title: Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918 
Author: Kayalı, Hasan
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: Arabs and Young Turks provides a detailed study of Arab politics in the late Ottoman Empire as viewed from the imperial capital in Istanbul. In an analytical narrative of the Young Turk period (1908-1918) historian Hasan Kayali discusses Arab concerns on the one hand and the policies of the Ottoman government toward the Arabs on the other. Kayali's novel use of documents from the Ottoman archives, as well as Arabic sources and Western and Central European documents, enables him to reassess conventional wisdom on this complex subject and to present an original appraisal of proto-nationalist ideologies as the longest-living Middle Eastern dynasty headed for collapse. He demonstrates the persistence and resilience of the supranational ideology of Islamism which overshadowed Arab and Turkish ethnic nationalism in this crucial transition period. Kayali's study reaches back to the nineteenth century and highlights both continuity and change in Arab-Turkish relations from the reign of Abdulhamid II to the constitutional period ushered in by the revolution of 1908. Arabs and Young Turks is essential for an understanding of contemporary issues such as Islamist politics and the continuing crises of nationalism in the Middle East.   [brief]
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Title: The Arab world: society, culture, and state
Author: Barakat, Halim Isber
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Sociology | Politics | Sociology
Publisher's Description: This wide-ranging examination of Arab society and culture offers a unique opportunity to know the Arab world from an Arab point of view. Halim Barakat, an expatriate Syrian who is both scholar and novelist, emphasizes the dynamic changes and diverse patterns that have characterized the Middle East since the mid-nineteenth century.The Arab world is not one shaped by Islam, nor one simply explained by reference to the sectarian conflicts of a "mosaic" society. Instead, Barakat reveals a society that is highly complex, with many and various contending polarities. It is a society in a state of becoming and change, one whose social contradictions are at the root of the struggle to transcend dehumanizing conditions. Arguing from a perspective that is both radical and critical, Barakat is committed to the improvement of human conditions in the Arab world.   [brief]
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Title: The Jewish state: a century later 
Author: Dowty, Alan 1940-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Middle Eastern Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: As the fiftieth anniversary of Israeli statehood approaches, along with the commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the World Zionist Organization, the question of what is meant by a "Jewish" state is particularly timely. Alan Dowty takes on that question in a book that is admirable for its clarity and its comprehensive interpretation of the historical roots and contemporary functioning of Israel.Israeli nationhood, democracy, and politics did not unfold in a social or political vacuum, but developed from power-sharing practices in pre-state Jewish communities in Palestine and in Eastern Europe. Dowty elucidates the broad cluster of cultural, historical, and ideological tenets which came to comprise Israel's contemporary political system. He demonstrates that such tenets were not arbitrary but in fact developed logically from Jewish political habits and the circumstances of time. Dowty illustrates how these traditions are balanced with those of ideology and modernization, and he provides an integrated, sophisticated analysis of the Israeli nation's formation and present state.Dowty also proposes thoughtful answers to puzzles regarding the strengths and weaknesses of Israeli democracy in responding to the challenges of communal divisions, religious contention, the country's non-Jewish minority, and accommodation with the Palestinians. The Jewish State will be invaluable for anyone looking for that one book that gives an intelligent overview of both Israel today and of its origins.   [brief]
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Title: Men, women, and God(s): Nawal El Saadawi and Arab feminist poetics 
Author: Malti-Douglas, Fedwa
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | Middle Eastern Studies | Gender Studies | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Men, Women, and God(s) is a pioneering study of the Arab world's leading feminist and most controversial woman writer, Nawal El Saadawi. Author of plays, memoirs, and such novels as Woman at Point Zero and The Innocence of the Devil , El Saadawi has become well known in the West as well as in the Arab community for her unforgettable female heroes and explosive narratives, which boldly address sexual violence, female circumcision, theology, and other politically charged themes. Her outspoken feminism and critique of patriarchy have also earned her the wrath of repressive forces in the Middle East. Imprisoned in her native Egypt under Sadat, El Saadawi is now among those on the death lists of Islamic religious conservatives.In Men, Women, and God(s) Fedwa Malti-Douglas makes the work of this important but little-understood writer truly accessible. Contending that El Saadawi's texts cannot be read in isolation from their Islamic and Arabic heritage, Malti-Douglas draws upon a deep knowledge of classical and modern Arabic textual traditions - and on extensive conversations with Nawal El Saadawi - to place the writer within her cultural and historical context. With this impassioned and radical exegesis of El Saadawi's prolific output, Malti-Douglas has written a crucial study of one of the most controversial and influential writers of our time.   [brief]
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Title: Memory for forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 
Author: Darwīsh, Maḥmūd
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | Literature in Translation | Middle Eastern Studies | Rhetoric
Publisher's Description: One of the Arab world's greatest living poets uses the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the shelling of Beirut as the setting for this sequence of prose poems. Mahmoud Darwish vividly recreates the sights and sounds of a city under terrible siege. As fighter jets scream overhead, he explores the war-ravaged streets of Beirut on August 6th (Hiroshima Day). Memory for Forgetfulness is an extended reflection on the invasion and its political and historical dimensions. It is also a journey into personal and collective memory. What is the meaning of exile? What is the role of the writer in time of war? What is the relationship of writing (memory) to history (forgetfulness)? In raising these questions, Darwish implicitly connects writing, homeland, meaning, and resistance in an ironic, condensed work that combines wit with rage.Ibrahim Muhawi's translation beautifully renders Darwish's testament to the heroism of a people under siege, and to Palestinian creativity and continuity.   [brief]
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Title: Perceptions of Palestine: their influence on U.S. Middle East policy 
Author: Christison, Kathleen 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Politics | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern Studies
Publisher's Description: For most of the twentieth century, considered opinion in the United States regarding Palestine has favored the inherent right of Jews to exist in the Holy Land. That Palestinians, as a native population, could claim the same right has been largely ignored. Kathleen Christison's controversial new book shows how the endurance of such assumptions, along with America's singular focus on Israel and general ignorance of the Palestinian point of view, has impeded a resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Christison begins with the derogatory images of Arabs purveyed by Western travelers to the Middle East in the nineteenth century, including Mark Twain, who wrote that Palestine's inhabitants were "abject beggars by nature, instinct, and education." She demonstrates other elements that have influenced U.S. policymakers: American religious attitudes toward the Holy Land that legitimize the Jewish presence; sympathy for Jews derived from the Holocaust; a sense of cultural identity wherein Israelis are "like us" and Arabs distant aliens. She makes a forceful case that decades of negative portrayals of Palestinians have distorted U.S. policy, making it virtually impossible to promote resolutions based on equality and reciprocity between Palestinians and Israelis. Christison also challenges prevalent media images and emphasizes the importance of terminology: Two examples are the designation of who is a "terrorist" and the imposition of place names (which can pass judgment on ownership). Christison's thoughtful book raises a final disturbing question: If a broader frame of reference on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict had been employed, allowing a less warped public discourse, might not years of warfare have been avoided and steps toward peace achieved much earlier?   [brief]
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Title: Willie Brown: a biography 
Author: Richardson, James 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Politics | History | United States History | Californian and Western History | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: This is the first comprehensive biography of Willie Brown, one of California's most enduring and controversial politicians. Audacious, driven, talented - Brown has dominated California politics longer and more completely than any other public figure. James Richardson, a senior writer for The Sacramento Bee , takes us from Brown's childhood, through his years as Speaker of the State Assembly, to his election as San Francisco's mayor. Along the way we get a riveting, behind-the-scenes account of three decades of California politics.   [brief]
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Title: Reclaiming America: Nike, clean air, and the new national activism
Author: Shaw, Randy 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: American Studies | Politics | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: Have activists taken the bumper-sticker adage "Think Globally, Act Locally" too literally? Randy Shaw argues that they have, with destructive consequences for America. Since the 1970s, activist participation in national struggles has steadily given way to a nearly exclusive focus on local issues. America's political and corporate elite has succeeded in controlling the national agenda, while their adversaries - the citizen activists and organizations who spent decades building federal programs to reflect the country's progressive ideals - increasingly bypass national fights. The result has been not only the dismantling of hard-won federal programs but also the sabotaging of local agendas and community instituions by decisions made in the national arena.Shaw urges activists and their organizations to implement a "new national activism" by channeling energy from closely knit local groups into broader causes. Such activism enables locally oriented activists to shape America's future and work on national fights without traveling to Washington, D.C., but instead working in their own backyards. Focusing on the David and Goliath struggle between Nike and grassroots activists critical of the company's overseas labor practices, Shaw shows how national activism can rewrite the supposedly ironclad rules of the global economy by ensuring fair wages and decent living standards for workers at home and abroad. Similarly, the recent struggles for stronger clean air standards and new federal budget priorities demonstrate the potential grassroots national activism to overcome the corporate and moneyed interests that increasingly dictate America's future. Reclaiming America's final section describes how community-based nonprofit organizations, the media, and the Internet are critical resources for building national activism. Shaw declares that community-based groups can and must combine their service work with national grassroots advocacy. He also describes how activists can use public relations to win attention in today's sprawling media environment, and he details the movement-building potential of e-mail. All these resources are essential for activists and their organizations to reclaim America's progressive ideals.   [brief]
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Title: Historical destiny and national socialism in Heidegger's "Being and time" 
Author: Fritsche, Johannes
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Philosophy | German Studies | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: There has been much debate over the relationship of Heidegger's philosophy - in particular his book Being and Time - to his practical involvement with National Socialism. Yet the question has never been addressed through a comparison of Being and Time with other texts on history and politics written at the time. Johannes Fritsche does this, providing a detailed interpretation of the relevant passages in Being and Time - especially sections 72-77 on fate, community, and society. He analyzes for comparison two other authors who explicitly regarded themselves as rightists - Adolf Hitler ( Mein Kampf ) and Max Scheler ( Formalism in Ethics and other writings) - and two authors on the left - Georg Lukács ( History and Class Consciousness ) and Paul Tillich ( The Socialist Decision ).Fritsche concludes that Being and Time is a brilliant summary of right-wing politics in general, which proposes the destruction of liberal society in order to regenerate an idealized community. In addition, Heidegger rejects positions on the right, such as Scheler's, that enabled their authors to distance themselves from the most extreme political rightists, and thus he paves the way for National Socialism. Being and Time , Fritsche demonstrates, must be seen as a clear case for the National Socialists and their project of revitalization of the Volksgemeinschaft , the community of the people.   [brief]
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Title: Popular music and national culture in Israel
Author: Regev, Motti
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Music | Ethnomusicology | Middle Eastern Studies | Popular Culture | Jewish Studies
Publisher's Description: A unique Israeli national culture - indeed, the very nature of "Israeliness" - remains a matter of debate, a struggle to blend vying memories and backgrounds, ideologies and wills. Identifying popular music as an important site in this wider cultural endeavor, this book focuses on the three major popular music cultures that are proving instrumental in attempts to invent Israeliness: the invented folk song repertoire known as Shirei Eretz Israel; the contemporary, global-cosmopolitan Israeli rock; and the ethnic-oriental musica mizrahit. The result is the first ever comprehensive study of popular music in Israel. Motti Regev, a sociologist, and Edwin Seroussi, an ethnomusicologist, approach their subject from alternative perspectives, producing a truly interdisciplinary, sociocultural account of music as a feature and a force in the shaping of Israeliness. A major ethnographic undertaking, describing and analyzing the particular history, characteristics, and practices of each music culture, Popular Music and National Culture in Israel maps not only the complex field of Israeli popular music but also Israeli culture in general.   [brief]
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Title: Politician's dilemma: building state capacity in Latin America
Author: Geddes, Barbara
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Latin American Studies | Economics and Business | Latin American History | Politics
Publisher's Description: In Latin America as elsewhere, politicians routinely face a painful dilemma: whether to use state resources for national purposes, especially those that foster economic development, or to channel resources to people and projects that will help insure political survival and reelection. While politicians may believe that a competent state bureaucracy is intrinsic to the national good, political realities invariably tempt leaders to reward powerful clients and constituents, undermining long-term competence. Politician's Dilemma explores the ways in which political actors deal with these contradictory pressures and asks the question: when will leaders support reforms that increase state capacity and that establish a more meritocratic and technically competent bureaucracy?Barbara Geddes brings rational choice theory to her study of Brazil between 1930 and 1964 and shows how state agencies are made more effective when they are protected from partisan pressures and operate through merit-based recruitment and promotion strategies. Looking at administrative reform movements in other Latin American democracies, she traces the incentives offered politicians to either help or hinder the process.In its balanced insight, wealth of detail, and analytical rigor, Politician's Dilemma provides a powerful key to understanding the conflicts inherent in Latin American politics, and to unlocking possibilities for real political change.   [brief]
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Title: Renaissance Paris: architecture and growth, 1475-1600 
Author: Thomson, David 1912-
Published: University of California Press,  1985
Subjects: Art | Architecture
Publisher's Description: In the modern literature on Renaissance art and architecture, Paris has often been considered the Cinderella of the European capitals. The prestigious buildings that were erected soon after François I decided in 1528 to make Paris his residence have long since been lost. Thomson, however, restores t . . . [more]
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Title: City of stone: the hidden history of Jerusalem
Author: Benvenisti, Meron 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Politics | History | Jewish Studies | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern Studies
Publisher's Description: Jerusalem is more than a holy city built of stone. Domain of Muslims, Jews, and Christians, Jerusalem is a perpetual contest, and its shrines, housing projects, and bulldozers compete in a scramble for possession. Now one of Jerusalem's most respected authorities presents a history of the city that does not fall prey to any one version of its past.Meron Benvenisti begins with a reflection on the 1996 celebration of Jerusalem's 3000-year anniversary as the capital of the Kingdom of Israel. He then juxtaposes eras, dynasties, and rulers in ways that provide grand comparative insights. But unlike recent politically motivated histories written to justify the claims of Jews and Arabs now living in Jerusalem, Benvenisti has no such agenda. His history is a polyphonic story that lacks victors as well as vanquished. He describes the triumphs and defeats of all the city's residents, from those who walk its streets today to the meddlesome ghosts who linger in its shadows.Benvenisti focuses primarily on the twentieth century, but ancient hatreds are constantly discovered just below the surface. These hostilities have created intense social, cultural, and political interactions that Benvenisti weaves into a compelling human story. For him, any claim to the city means recognizing its historical diversity and multiple populations.A native son of Jerusalem, Benvenisti knows the city well, and his integrated history makes clear that all of Jerusalem's citizens have enriched the Holy City in the past. It is his belief that they can also do so in the future.   [brief]
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