Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture

“Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg’s volume Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture makes an invaluable contribution to the growing field of Middle Eastern cultural studies. Refusing essentialist understandings of culture, the editors and authors also transcend traditional Marxist paradigms. The volume insightfully illuminates the often marginalized issue of the politics of culture within the contested terrain of Palestine and Israel.”-Ella Shohat, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Cultural Studies, New York University

“This empirically rich, theoretically innovative, and unusually wide-ranging volume brings together a set of fascinating and insightful explorations of the popular culture and cultural politics of Palestine/Israel, including music, cinema, television, cyberculture, tourism, comics, and the role of Israel and the Jews in U. S. evangelical Christian eschatology. By demonstrating how culture has been a crucial and often formative domain of contention both within and between Arab and Jewish societies in Palestine over the past century and down to the present day, the contributors open up a great deal of extremely valuable terrain that has been sorely neglected until now.”-Zachary Lockman, author of Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism

“This theoretically savvy, eye-opening tour through popular culture in and about Palestine and Israel confirms at once the inherent inseparability of culture/politics and the gripping mutuality of Israel/Palestine.”-Lila Abu-Lughod, author of Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt

"[P]rovocative. . . . [T]he essays in this volume . . . imaginatively deconstruct aspects of popular culture still seeping across the walls erected through this long and intractable conflict."

- Donna Robinson Divine (Digest of Middle East Studies)