Here are 100 books that Like Birds in a Cage fans have personally recommended if you like
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I'm a professor of New Testament theology who has served in a variety of Christian settings in higher education. My introduction to the world of the Middle East came in the 1970s when I spent a year in Beirut, Lebanon, at the American University. Here I studied Arabic, Islam, and regional politics—and unexpectedly had a front-row seat during the Lebanese civil war. After I completed a PhD in theology and began my career, I returned to the region many times. It was my frequent trips to Israel/Palestine that caught my attention. I’ve led countless student trips to this region and participated in theology conferences. But it's the puzzle of Israel-Palestine that always draws me back.
Chapman has been a theology professor and Islam specialist in the Middle East for many years.
He now resides in Cambridge, England, and has offered one of the best analyses of the current conflicts that don’t want to go away.
This book is unmatched for its clarity and willingness to call out countries—especially Israel—for astonishing human rights abuses. Few have the courage to do this, and Chapman does it with academic depth and conviction.
The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has profoundly affected the Middle East for almost seventy years, and shows no sign of ending. With two peoples claiming the same piece of land for different reasons, it remains a huge political and humanitarian problem. Can it ever be resolved? If so, how? These are the basic questions addressed in a new and substantially revised fifth edition of this highly acclaimed book. Having lived and worked in the Middle East at various times since 1968, Colin Chapman explains the roots of the problem and outlines the arguments of the main parties involved.…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I'm a professor of New Testament theology who has served in a variety of Christian settings in higher education. My introduction to the world of the Middle East came in the 1970s when I spent a year in Beirut, Lebanon, at the American University. Here I studied Arabic, Islam, and regional politics—and unexpectedly had a front-row seat during the Lebanese civil war. After I completed a PhD in theology and began my career, I returned to the region many times. It was my frequent trips to Israel/Palestine that caught my attention. I’ve led countless student trips to this region and participated in theology conferences. But it's the puzzle of Israel-Palestine that always draws me back.
Raheb is a pastor/scholar who lives in Bethlehem and has become one of the most important Palestinian voices describing the Arab Christian experience withinthe Israeli occupation.
It is rare to read an actual Palestinian voice in this conflict—and rarer still to hear one coming from the church. Raheb is widely respected in academic work but also in the regional church. He has started a remarkable university (Dar al-Kalima University College) and a myriad of projects to alleviate the problem of Bethlehem’s life under military occupation.
Persecution of Christians in the Middle East has been a recurring theme since the middle of the nineteenth century. The topic has experienced a resurgence in the last few years, especially during the Trump era. Middle Eastern Christians are often portrayed as a homogeneous, helpless group ever at the mercy of their Muslim enemies, a situation that only Western powers can remedy. The Politics of Persecution revisits this narrative with a critical eye.
Mitri Raheb charts the plight of Christians in the Middle East from the invasion of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799 to the so-called Arab Spring. The book analyzes…
I'm a professor of New Testament theology who has served in a variety of Christian settings in higher education. My introduction to the world of the Middle East came in the 1970s when I spent a year in Beirut, Lebanon, at the American University. Here I studied Arabic, Islam, and regional politics—and unexpectedly had a front-row seat during the Lebanese civil war. After I completed a PhD in theology and began my career, I returned to the region many times. It was my frequent trips to Israel/Palestine that caught my attention. I’ve led countless student trips to this region and participated in theology conferences. But it's the puzzle of Israel-Palestine that always draws me back.
If it is rare to read a Palestinian voice in this conflict, it is rarer still to hear a Jewish voice that is willing to speak honestly and critically about what is going on.
Braverman is an internationally known and respected Jewish author and activist whose first book, The Fatal Embrace, won him a wide readership. Here he narrows his work to Jerusalem itself and discloses secrets about the city and its politics that few Americans ever hear.
The conflict between Israel and Palestine is at the center of a firestorm of political controversy, religious zeal, and bloodshed in the Middle East. Many feel that they have a biblical obligation to 'stand with Israel' - but do we really understand the conflict? And is Zionism the true path to peace?
An American Jew, Mark Braverman was transformed by witnessing firsthand the devastating consequences of the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians to bring peace to their land. From the bustling communities on either side of the Jerusalem barrier, to the historical intricacies of the Holocaust and South African apartheid,…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
I'm a professor of New Testament theology who has served in a variety of Christian settings in higher education. My introduction to the world of the Middle East came in the 1970s when I spent a year in Beirut, Lebanon, at the American University. Here I studied Arabic, Islam, and regional politics—and unexpectedly had a front-row seat during the Lebanese civil war. After I completed a PhD in theology and began my career, I returned to the region many times. It was my frequent trips to Israel/Palestine that caught my attention. I’ve led countless student trips to this region and participated in theology conferences. But it's the puzzle of Israel-Palestine that always draws me back.
Canon is the executive director of Churches for Middle East Peace based in Washington D.C. and a person with wide academic and personal experience with the churches in Israel/Palestine.
Here she has edited a collection of 29 chapters written by a vast array of Christian leaders from around the world, from Desmond Tutu to Shane Claiborne. Each is reflecting on the conflict in Israel/Palestine and Christian responses to it.
It is the diversity of views that gives this book its strength and quickly you’ll see that there is hope for the Middle East if we are simply honest about the origin and nature of the struggle.
A Land Full of God gives American Christians an opportunity to promote peace and justice in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It shows them how to understand the enmity with brief, digestible, and comprehensive essays about the historical, political, religious, and geographical tensions that have led to many of the dynamics we see today. All the while, A Land Full of God walks readers through a biblical perspective of God's heart for Israel and the historic suffering of the Jewish people, while also remaining sensitive to the experience and suffering of Palestinians. The prevailing wave of Christian voices are seeking a pro-Israeli,…
I am an associate professor of history at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX, where I teach courses on modern United States history, U.S. foreign relations, and public history, direct our minor in museum studies, and direct the Mellon Initiative for Undergraduate Research in the Arts and Humanities. I am particularly interested in how domestic culture, ideology, and values have informed how the United States has engaged with the world around it. My recent work has explored the influence of conservative religious groups in foreign affairs, and I’m at work on a new book about national security and the congressional debates that unfolded over foreign aid after World War II.
Much of the focus in news media and the popular imagination about evangelicals and foreign policy centers on Israel, with many pundits and scholars alike emphasizing the centrality of apocalyptic end-times prophecies to the development of conservative Christian support for Israel. Hummel’s exceptionally researched and beautifully written book provides much-needed nuance to this often one-dimensional narrative. His careful reading of U.S. and Israeli sources sheds new light on the emergence of evangelical Christian Zionism after 1948 and its many permutations throughout the decades that followed. This is a crucial read for understanding the complexities and religious dynamics of modern U.S.-Israeli relations.
Weaving together the stories of activists, American Jewish leaders, and Israeli officials in the wake of the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Covenant Brothers portrays the dramatic rise of evangelical Christian Zionism as it gained prominence in American politics, Israeli diplomacy, and international relations after World War II. According to Daniel G. Hummel, conventional depictions of the Christian Zionist movement-the organized political and religious effort by conservative Protestants to support the state of Israel-focus too much on American evangelical apocalyptic fascination with the Jewish people. Hummel emphasizes instead the institutional, international, interreligious, and intergenerational efforts on the…
I completed my Ph.D. in history at Georgetown University in 1989 and have taught courses on the modern Middle East at the American University in Cairo since 1990. Since the early 2000s, I’ve been teaching a popular course on the history of Zionism. In developing the curriculum for my students, I searched for an English translation of the proceedings of the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel in 1897, a crucial moment in Jewish/Zionist history. When I discovered no such translation existed, I decided to do one myself. It was fascinating work, and the translation was published in 2019.
I was excited to discover Dowty’s anthology because I appreciated his translation/publication of certain Hebrew texts from two early Zionists, i.e., Ahad Ha’am and Yitzhak Epstein. As indicated by the title, this volume, while representing Jewish and Arab voices going back to the 1800s, foregrounds the contradictory viewpoints of, specifically, Israelis and Palestinians and brings the story of the conflict of these two ethnonational groups down to about 2015.
Since my students are mostly political science majors, they are aware that a major debate at present is whether Israel/Palestine should be one state or two. The last section of the Dowty book contains texts that advocate for a "one-state solution" vs. others that propose a "two-state solution."
Introduction to any complex international conflict is enriched when the voices of the adversaries are heard. The Israel/Palestine Reader is an innovative collection, focused on the human dimension of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian confrontation. Its vivid and illuminating readings present the voices of the diverse parties through personal testimonies and analyses. Key leaders, literary figures, prominent analysts, and simply close observers of different phases of this protracted conflict are all represented-in their own words.
From Mark Twain to Theodor Herzl, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Golda Meir, Anwar Sadat, Ezer Weizman, Ehud Barak, Marwan Barghouti, Mahmoud Abbas, Benjamin Netanyahu, John Kerry, and…
Big Ideas... For Small Businesses
by
John Lamerton,
Big Ideas… for Small Businesses is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guide to growing a small business without sacrificing your lifestyle. Written by a former civil servant turned entrepreneur, the book challenges hustle culture and instead champions the idea of an "ambitious lifestyle business" - one that provides freedom and financial stability,…
Ilan Pappé is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict.
This was the first book to bring in one place the Palestinian narrative after years of denying it and allowing only the Israeli/Zionist narrative to dominate both the public and the scholarly domains in the West. Said's elegant prose contributed made that history accessible to a large audience of readers.
This original and deeply provocative book was the first to make Palestine the subject of a serious debate--one that remains as critical as ever. With the rigorous scholarship he brought to his influential Orientalism and an exile's passion (he is Palestinian by birth), Edward W. Said traces the fatal collision between two peoples in the Middle East and its repercussions in the lives of both the occupier and the occupied--as well as in the conscience of the West. He has updated this landmark work to portray the changed status of Palestine and its people in light of such developments as…
I'm a Communication professor at Fresno Pacific University and former Fulbright grantee to Jordan. Growing up in west Texas I was always fascinated with other countries. I encountered Arabic in college, and I quickly fell in love with a language and society that reminded me so much of my home—in fact, the word “haboob” is used by Texas farmers and Bedouin herders alike to describe a violent dust storm. While I was teaching English in Amman, I realized how much I enjoy learning how different cultures come to understand one another. My driving passion is to explore the centuries-long rhetorical history tying Americans and Middle Easterners together in mutual webs of (mis)representation, and this topic has never been more relevant than today.
The Arab-Israeli conflict can be bewildering for many Americans to wrap their head around. While there are a number of excellent books on the topic, I find Perceptions of Palestine to be a helpful, engaging diagnosis of the issue from a U.S. diplomatic perspective. Christison, a former CIA officer, provides an exhaustively researched and well-informed answer to the question of why the United States tends to favor Israel over the Palestinians in the realms of public opinion and policymaking. This account is both sensitive to the struggles of the Palestinian people while also recognizing the real-world limitations of American policymakers. No matter one’s position on this issue, Christion’s book provides a welcome analysis of the tensions at play in conflicts over Israel-Palestine.
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…
I began studying the Israeli-Palestinian relationship as an idealistic Brandeis University student living in Jerusalem in 1969, when I directly encountered the Palestinian problem and the realities of the occupation. Trained at Berkeley to be a political scientist I devoted my life to finding a path to a two-state solution. In 2010 I reached the tragic conclusion that the “point of no return” toward Israeli absorption of the occupied territories had indeed been passed. Bored with the ideas that my old way of thinking was producing, I forced myself to think, as Hannah Arendt advised, “without a bannister.” Paradigm Lostis the result.
Gershon Shafir’s book on the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a crucial text for all those seeking to reconstruct a history of Israel, the Zionist movement, and the encounter between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. He did the unprecedented act of actually reading and studying virtually all the diaries and journals kept, over decades, by the small but extraordinarily dedicated and articulate group of early Zionist settlers. Contrary to official myths about a visionary Zionist blueprint for building the institutions we associate with Israel, Shafir shows that the kibbutz, the Jewish National Fund, the principle of Jewish labor, and, ultimately, the idea of the kind of “Jewish state” that actually emerged, were not the cause of the confrontation with the Arabs, but a product of it.
This brings Palestinian Arabs into the story of Zionism in the best and most responsible way—by showing how real people, confronting desperate personal…
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 the particular conditions of the local conflict between the European "settlers" and the Palestinian Arab population.
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
Professor Tessler attended university in Israel and an Arab country, Tunisia, and he has lived for extended periods both in Israel and in several Arab countries. He has written extensively not only on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but also on politics in Israel and a number of Arab countries. With respect to the latter, he has gained distinction for his groundbreaking research on public opinion in the Arab world; he co-founded the Arab Barometer survey project in 2006 and has been its co-director since that time. The first edition of his book, A History of the Israel-Palestinian Conflict, was named a notable book of the year by The New York Times.
The Israel–Palestine Conflict introduces the historical basis of the dispute and explores both the tangible issues and intangible factors that have prolonged the conflict and blocked a peaceful resolution.
Author Neil Caplan helps readers understand the complexities and contradictions of the conflict and why the histories of Palestine and Israel are so fiercely contested. The 2nd edition offers fresh insights about the impact of current global and regional trends marked by instability and violence that reduce the prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation.
The 2nd addition also addresses recent debates over two-state versus one-state solutions, growing polarization in public discourse outside of the Middle East, the role of public intellectuals, and the growing trend of merging scholarship with advocacy.
One of the "10 Must-Read Histories of the Palestine-Israel Conflict" -Ian Black, Literary Hub, on the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration
The new edition of the acclaimed text that explores the issues continuing to define the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Numerous instances of competing, sometimes incompatible narratives of controversial events are found throughout history. Perhaps the starkest example of such contradictory representations is the decades-long conflict between Israel and Palestine. For over 140 years, Israelis, Palestinians, and scores of peacemakers have failed to establish a sustainable, mutually-acceptable solution. The Israel-Palestine Conflict introduces the historical basis of the dispute and…
