MER Article Khazzoom, Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel Aziza Khazzoom, Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel: Or, How the Polish Peddler Became a German Intellectual (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). The ethnic divide among Jewish Israelis is an elusive concept and a rarely acknowledged reality. There are no discriminatory Tamir Sorek • 4 min read
MER Article Beyond the Bush Doctrine Will the Bush doctrine come to an end on January 20, 2009, when President Barack Obama takes office? Surely, Obama will distance himself from regime change and preventive war. He has pledged to de-escalate the Iraq war with a phased redeployment and rebuild America’s alliances and image abroad throu Waleed Hazbun • 16 min read
MER Article On Torture BOOKS REVIEWED: Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Laleh Khalili • 18 min read
MER Article Cosmetic Surgery and the Beauty Regime in Lebanon In May 2007, the First National Bank of Lebanon embarked on a unique media campaign. Some 900 billboards in Arabic and English sprouted up offering loans, not to buy a home or to pay tuition, but to “get the makeover of your dreams.” The corresponding magazine advertisement featured a blond-haired, Sandra Beth Doherty • 11 min read
MER Article The Politics of Persecution The video opens with a young Sudanese boy being interviewed outside a hut. “They wanted me to become a Muslim,” he says through a translator. “But I told them I wouldn’t. I am a Christian.” “It was then,” a deep male voiceover intones, “that he was thrown on a burning fire.” The boy looks away from Melani McAlister • 26 min read
MER Article Civil Wrongs Within 24 hours of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Bush administration had announced the identities of the alleged perpetrators, all but one dead, and had largely reconstructed the plot as it understood it. In short order the administration put forth the notion that another such attack was immin Louise Cainkar • 13 min read
MER Article Imagining the Next Occupation When Lt. Gen. William Caldwell pitched the US Army’s updated field manual on the March 10 Daily Show, Jon Stewart inquired: “If I read this, can I take over a country?” Caldwell, who served 13 months in Iraq and today runs the Combined Arms Center in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, demurred with a chuckle. Jason Brownlee • 11 min read
MER Article Not All Roads Lead to Washington In the summer of 2008, there was an epidemic of diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East. The new diplomacy represented a striking break with the pattern of statesmanship that has prevailed in the region for the last decade: It always involved an ally of the United States talking to an enemy of Ame Yahya Sadowski • 10 min read
MER Article From the Editor (Winter 2008) The sheer symbolic power of the election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States is difficult to capture in words. It is not only that a black man has won the highest office of a nation that, at its inception, defined close to every black man or woman as three fifths of a (Author not identified) • 5 min read
