More in ‘Middle East’

Postmodernists long ago disabused us of the idea that texts have stable, fixed meanings. French literary critics like Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes introduced a vision of the text as a tricky, shape-shifting improvisation; their American disciples like Stanley Fish proposed that these texts only acquire meaning through the efforts of interpretive communities. The relevance ...

The Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman has looked over test scores and class participation, and decided to fail President Barack Obama for his handling of the Middle East in his first year in office: “Since there are no prospects of talks on the horizon, and in many ways what their efforts wrought was a wasted year ...

Psychologist Stephen P. Cohen has made his career as what he calls a “citizen diplomat.” He runs the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development, which he founded, and he’s been working for 40 years to try to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, participating in secret negotiations that have included Israel’s Shimon Peres and Moshe ...

As news headline writers struggle daily to come up with different ways to say “No Progress on Peace Talks” and “Iran’s Gonna Do Whatever it Damn Well Pleases,” the Middle East in general is becoming more susceptible to radical anti-Israel factions, according to the Associated Press. Actually, as the news service puts it, the region ...

Blogger Jack Midknight sees a possible silver lining for the ever-troubled Middle East. If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, he points out, there’s good news in the fact that, as he says, “Arabs fear a nuclear armed Iran, far more than the Jews of Israel.”
Midknight (who is, presumably, writing under a pseudonym ...

• Responses from Jewish organizations to President Obama’s speech in Cairo range from thrilled (J Street) to worried (Orthodox Union). [JTA]
• Reactions from across the Middle East, meantime, are a bit more colorful. [NYT]
• Obama has moved on to Europe; the director of the museum at Buchenwald says the POTUS’s visit to the former death ...

Lucette Lagnado was only six years old when she left Cairo with her family. It was 1963, seven years after Gamal Abdel Nasser had begun to nationalize Egyptian businesses and to force out the country’s once-thriving Jewish community, along with other supposed foreign influences. Leon Lagnado, Lucette’s father, already in his 60s by then and ...

Claudia Roden’s education started at an early age. Raised in Cairo, she grew up watching the women of her family pound lamb and wheat into kibbeh, and wrap delicate sheets of pastry around mashed dates. Over the years, she’s made her way into countless kitchens, from Turkey to Poland, Lebanon to Spain, and written several ...