This book mines the early history of modern Lebanon, focusing on the country’s Jewish community and examining inter-Lebanese relations. It gives voice to personal testimonies, family archives, private papers, recollections of expatriate and resident Lebanese Jewish communities, as well as rarely tapped archival sources. With unique access to the Jewish communities in Lebanon and the Greater Middle East, the author presents both history and memory of Lebanon’s Jews, considering what, how, and why they choose to remember their Lebanese lives. The work retells the history of Lebanon by placing Lebanese Jews into the country’s narrative from the 1920s to 1970s, including an examination of the role they played in the construction of Lebanon’s multi-sectarian system.

This text tells the story of the Lebanese Jews in the 20th century. It challenges the prevailing view that all Jews in the Midlle East were second class citizens, and were persecuted after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The Jews of Lebanon were just one of Lebanon's 23 minorities with the same rights and privileges and subject to the same political tensions.

The Jews of Beirut: The Rise of a Levantine Community, 1860s-1930s is the first study to investigate the emergence of an organized and vibrant Jewish community in Beirut in the late Ottoman and French period. Viewed in the context of port city revival, the author explores how and why the Jewish community changed during this time in its social cohesion, organizational structure, and ideological affiliations. Tomer Levi defines the Jewish community as a «Levantine» creation of late-nineteenth-century port city revival, characterized by cultural and social diversity, centralized administration, efficient organization, and a merchant class engaged in commerce and philanthropy. In addition, the author shows how the position of the Jewish community in the unique multi-community structure of Lebanese society affected internal developments within the Jewish community.

Hezbollah — Lebanon’s ‘Party of God’ — is a multifaceted organisation: it is a powerful political party in Lebanon, a Shia religious and social movement, Lebanon’s largest militia, a close ally of Iran, and a terrorist organisation. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including recently declassified government documents, court records, and personal interviews with intelligence officials, Matthew Levitt examines Hezbollah’s beginnings, its first violent forays in Lebanon, and then its terrorist activities and criminal enterprises abroad in Europe, the Middle East, South America, Southeast Asia, Africa, and finally in North America. He also discusses Hezbollah’s unit dedicated to supporting Palestinian militant groups and the group’s involvement in training and supporting insurgents who fought US troops in post-Saddam Iraq. The book concludes with a look at Hezbollah’s integral and ongoing role in Iran’s ‘shadow war’ with Israel and the West, including plots targeting civilians around the world. Levitt shows convincingly that Hezbollah’s willingness to deploy violence at home and abroad, its global reach, and its proxy-patron relationship with the Iranian regime are all matters worthy of the utmost concern.

What causes violent conflicts around the Middle East? All too often, the answer is sectarianism—popularly viewed as a timeless and intractable force that leads religious groups to conflict. In Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon, Joanne Nucho shows how wrong this perspective can be. Through in-depth research with local governments, NGOs, and political parties in Beirut, she demonstrates how sectarianism is actually recalibrated on a daily basis through the provision of essential services and infrastructures, such as electricity, medical care, credit, and the planning of bridges and roads. Taking readers to a working-class, predominantly Armenian suburb in northeast Beirut called Bourj Hammoud, Nucho conducts extensive interviews and observations in medical clinics, social service centers, shops, banking coops, and municipal offices. She explores how group and individual access to services depends on making claims to membership in the dominant sectarian community, and she examines how sectarianism is not just tied to ethnoreligious identity, but also class, gender, and geography. Life in Bourj Hammoud makes visible a broader pattern in which the relationships that develop while procuring basic needs become a way for people to see themselves as part of the greater public. Illustrating how sectarianism in Lebanon is not simply about religious identity, as is commonly thought, Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon offers a new look at how everyday social exchanges define and redefine communities and conflicts.

After six decades of protracted refugeehood, patterns of social identification are changing among the young people of the fourth refugee generation in the Palestinian refugee camp Burj al-Shamali in Southern Lebanon. Though their identity as Palestinian refugees remains the same compared to older refugee generations, there is an important shift in the young refugees’ relationship towards the homeland, their status as refugees, Islam, the camp society, as well as in their relationship towards religious or ethnic “others” in and outside Lebanon. This ePaper examines how technology, globalisation and outside influences have impacted the young Palestinians’ interpretation of their identity and their understanding of Palestinianness. The author concludes with reflections on the young refugees’ attitudes towards their Palestinian identity in the diaspora, which, as she argues, can only survive when the young refugees see their identity as a virtue rather than as a hindrance.

From Simon & Schuster, Israel's Lebanon War is the first and only complete inside account of a disastrous military adventure and its ongoing consequences. A detailed narrative by two Israeli journalists on the origins, conduct, and political repercussions of the Lebanon war, based on previously unreleased documents and interviews with high officials.

The Yearbook of International Religious Demography presents an annual snapshot of the state of religious statistics around the world. Every year large amounts of data are collected through censuses, surveys, polls, religious communities, scholars, and a host of other sources. These data are collated and analyzed by research centers and scholars around the world. Large amounts of data appear in analyzed form in the World Religion Database (Brill), aiming at a researcher’s audience. The Yearbook presents data in sets of tables and scholarly articles spanning social science, demography, history, and geography. Each issue offers findings, sources, methods, and implications surrounding international religious demography. Each year an assessment is made of new data made available since the previous issue of the yearbook. The 2018 volume features a wide range of subjects, including approaches to measuring religious violence, religious changes in the Indian Subcontinent, religious demography in Lebanon, Baptism and Godparenthood in Catholic Europe, the relevance of social media data for religious demographic research, and the methodological and practical challenges of measuring religiosity in Turkey. Contributors are: Todd M. Johnson, Gina Zurlo, Peter Crossing, Robert Brathwaite, J. K. Bajaj, M. D. Srinivas, Wissam Raji, Yves Rahme, Marc Zeinoun, Charbel Zeidan, Guido Alfani, Joey Marshall, Zubeyir Nisanci, Juan Carlos Esparza Ochoa, María Concepción Servín Nieto.

Close friends since childhood, Kyle, Duncan and Ivan have become rich, successful co-owners of a beautiful Harlem brownstone. The one thing each of them lacks is a special woman to share his life with—until true love steps in to transform three sexy single guys into grooms-to-be…. Handsome psychotherapist Ivan Campbell could diagnose his own issues in a heartbeat—fear of commitment. Every woman he meets is convinced he's the complete package, yet no one has been able to get past the wall he built around himself long ago. But Nayo Goddard isn't looking for marriage. The petite, stylish photographer plays by her own rules and makes it crystal clear she has no interest in settling down. A fun, passionate, no-strings relationship with Nayo should be the perfect solution for Ivan—except suddenly he wants more, much more. And this time, the love 'em and leave 'em bachelor may be the one who's left heartbroken….

“A book about young men transformed by war, written by a veteran whose dazzling literary gifts gripped my attention from the first page to the last.” —The Wall Street Journal “Friedman’s sober and striking new memoir . . . [is] on a par with Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried -- its Israeli analog.” —The New York Times Book Review It was just one small hilltop in a small, unnamed war in the late 1990s, but it would send out ripples that are still felt worldwide today. The hill, in Lebanon, was called the Pumpkin; flowers was the military code word for “casualties.” Award-winning writer Matti Friedman re-creates the harrowing experience of a band of young Israeli soldiers charged with holding this remote outpost, a task that would change them forever, wound the country in ways large and small, and foreshadow the unwinnable conflicts the United States would soon confront in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Pumpkinflowers is a reckoning by one of those young soldiers now grown into a remarkable writer. Part memoir, part reportage, part history, Friedman’s powerful narrative captures the birth of today’s chaotic Middle East and the rise of a twenty-first-century type of war in which there is never a clear victor and media images can be as important as the battle itself. Raw and beautifully rendered, Pumpkinflowers will take its place among classic war narratives by George Orwell, Philip Caputo, and Tim O’Brien. It is an unflinching look at the way we conduct war today.