aljadid

On Hips and Heritage: Cairo Nativists Object to Invasion of Foreign Belly Dancers!

by Naomi Pham. The recent arrest of Russian belly dancer Ekaterina Andreeva, who goes by her stage name Johara, has sparked questions about how to view foreigners [...]

7 September 2018

“2084” Proves Less than Orwellian

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31 October 2017

The Poet Milton and Islam: A Tale of Mutual Influence

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30 June 2017

The Decline of Lebanese Press? A Story of Politics, Corruption, Nepotism and Sectarianism

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7 March 2017

Q&A with Director and Writer Reine Mitri on Her Banned Film “In this Land Lay Graves of Mine”

by Angele Ellis. Ellis: Watching “In This Land,” this viewer was affected by how the film moves back and forth between elegy, emotional exorcism, and indictment of [...]

21 June 2016

Syrian Children and the Exit from the Dark Tunnel!

by Salam Kawakibi. For more than five decades, the Syrian child was subjected to an orderly process of upbringing to control the phases of his growth and maturity. Following [...]

10 April 2016

Aleppo: A Catastrophe Defying Poets’ Powers of Description

by Amjad Nasser. When talking about what is happening in Syria, I face the inability of language to express reality. My vocabulary remains limited. My ability to describe [...]

27 February 2016

The Syrian War Has Taken Us Prematurely to Hell!

by Father George Massouh. The crimes committed in Syria have surpassed what the human mind can imagine in terms of horrors and atrocities. Undoubtedly, in our cruel East, we [...]

28 January 2016

Syrian Booknotes

by Elie Chalala. Since the 2011 March uprising, scores of books have been published on Syrian politics, with most written by a new generation of scholars with no longstanding [...]

23 January 2016

From Harem to Civil Society: The Journey of Fatima Mernissi

by Yassin Adnan. For some years, Fatima Mernissi has remained absent from the limelight. While she has written books that have shaken both Arab and Western opinion for two [...]

16 December 2015

A Subtle Approach to Unmasking the Assad Regime

by Bobby Gulshan. I struggled a bit to know what to say about PBS Frontline’s “Inside Assad’s Syria.” Searching the internet for reviews of the film, I found [...]

10 November 2015

Whatever is Left of the Levantine Spirit?

by Elie Chalala. The Arab world lives in a state of nostalgia for bygone days, when much of the hatred and intolerance of today had not set in, and the demographic minorities [...]

8 November 2015

Europe’s New Refugee Problem Requires Explanation beyond War!

by Bobby Gulshan. The scenes of refugees drowning by the hundreds in the seas between Turkey and Greece as they attempt to reach Europe are harrowing. They come from all [...]

29 October 2015

Reconstructing the Disastrous History of the Lebanese Famine

by Angele Ellis. Despite his almost uniformly dry and scholarly tone, Louis Farshee’s painstaking reconstruction of the famine that may have claimed as many as 375,000 [...]

18 October 2015

Novelist Salwa Bakr Dares to Say it Aloud

by Elie Chalala. Revolution’s successes and failures; the taboos broken, how political Islam’s “holiness” mask dropped; the intelligentsia’s flight to the past [...]

15 February 2015

Radwa Ashour (1946-2014) A Literary, Cultural and Political Activist Icon, Echoing in Egypt’s Valley

by Professor Nada Ramadan Elnahla. The valley was flooding with apparitions . . . Silence, followed by a crescendo. A sound that will echo in the valley years later. [...]

8 February 2015

Lebanon and Algeria: Collective Memory and Cultural Trauma

by Wided Khadraoui. Literature can be a useful tool for confronting tragedies of the past. In their newest plays, Algerian playwright Slimane Benaissa and Lebanese [...]

13 January 2015

Slave to History: A Moor in the New World

The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami Pantheon Books, 2014, pp. 324. In her new novel, Moroccan-American writer Laila Lalami, turns to the 1500’s Spanish conquest [...]

12 January 2015