Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s rich new book, Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016) takes readers on a global journey in search of late 19th and early 20th century Se...

The Resolution of the Suspect by Israeli photographer Miki Kratsman, with text by Ariella Azoulay, is co-published by the Peabody Museum Press at Harvard and Radius Books of Santa Fe, NM (2016). Mr. Kratsman was the 2011 recipient of the Robert Gardner...

You read a lot about “Orientalism,” that is, the often odd ways in which Westerners tried to understand predominantly Middle Eastern peoples and cultures. You don’t read a lot about good Western scholarship on predominately Middle Eastern peoples and c...

The Crusades loom large in contemporary popular consciousness. However, our public understanding has largely been informed from a western perspective, despite the fact that there is a rich textual tradition recording its history in Muslim sources.

From the 1880s onward, Beirut-based calendars and almanacs were in high demand as they packaged at least four different calendars into one, including: “the reformed Gregorian calendar; the unreformed, Julian calendar used by various churches of the Eas...

From his modest beginnings in southern Iran, the Persian king Cyrus II went on to conquer three of the dominant kingdoms of the ancient Near East those of the Medians, the Lydians, and the Babylonians and establish the first world empire.

Among the most frequent demands made of Islam and Muslims today is to become more moderate. But what counts as moderate and who will decide so are questions with less than obvious answers. In her timely and politically urgent new book Beyond Religious ...

Bard Kartveit‘s Dilemmas of Attachment: Identity and Belonging among Palestinian Christians (Brill, 2014) is an outstanding book, which carefully describes the constraints faced by Palestinian Christians, particularly in the unique context of the Bethl...

Marc Lynch is the author of The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East (Public Affairs, 2016). Lynch is a professor of political science at George Washington University and blogs at the Monkey Cage. From Tunisia to Egypt to Syria,

Edward Said’s 1978 book, Orientalism, dramatically shifted how people think about the production of knowledge and representations of the Other. His ideas have been championed and critiqued with dozens of books expanding his work on the construction of ...

In Dying to Forget: Oil, Power, Palestine, and the Foundations of U.S. Policy in the Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2015), Irene L. Gendzier, Professor Emerita in the Department of Political Science at Boston University,

In her stunning new book The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant (Stanford University Press, 2012), Dana Sajdi, Associate Professor of History at Boston College, presents a riveting narrative of the intersectio...

As the title of the monograph suggests, Contemporary Issues in Islam (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) by Asma Afsaruddin, guides the reader through an organized and compelling narrative of reflections on hot-button topics in the modern world.

In Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929 (Brandeis University Press, 2015), Hillel Cohen, senior lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explores the outbreak of violence in Palestine in 1929. It was that year, not 1948 or 1967,

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) is one of the most famous Muslim thinkers in history. His autobiographical account, The Deliverer from Error, tells us of his spiritual crisis and transformative experience of journeying,

In Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran (University of California Press, 2015), Jason Mokhtarian, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies at the Indiana University,

In her excellent new book The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East (UNC Press, 2015), Kishwar Rizvi, Associate Professor of the History of Art at Yale University,

Anniversaries are funny things. Sometimes, as with the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, they are accompanied by a flood of discussion and debate.  Other times they are allowed to pass in silence.

In her fascinating new book Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Duke University Press, 2015), Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University,

An interview with Afsaneh Najmabadi

Winner of the 2015 American Anthropological Associations Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology and the 2014 JMEWS Book Award of the Association for Middle East Womens Studies,

In the late nineteenth century, Jewish immigrants inspired by Zionism began to settle in Palestine. Their goal was not only to establish a politically sovereign state, but also to create a new, modern, Hebrew nation.

In Islam’s Jesus (University of Florida Press, 2015), Zeki Saritoprak explores an old topic from a fresh perspective. The status of Jesus in Islam has been of interest for centuries, and relates to both Christianity and Islam,

In Conscientious Objectors in Israel: Citizenship, Sacrifice, Trials of Fealty (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), Erica Weiss, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University,

In Imagining the Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), Ranen Omer-Sherman, a professor at the University of Louisville, looks at literary and cinematic representations of the kibbutz,