Every summer, cultural festivals take place all over Morocco, and streets in towns and cities become animated scenes for the articulation of Moroccan contemporary culture. So animated, heterogeneous and pluralistic has this festival scene become that the semiofficial newspaper for the Islamist PJD party has called these street festivals “vectors of decadence” and performing-artist union officials have declared that they feel threatened by the “foreign invasion” of internationally-based diaspora groups. Recently, in a critique of these attitudes, the magazine Telquel reported that they are “sick of the wet-rags of the festival season” that deny “millions of happy festival-goers the occasional…free oasis in the grand cultural desert of Morocco.” Describing the street as an oasis of culture vis-à-vis the desert landscape of Moroccan cultural institutions is not a new trope. In this paper I explore how Moroccan artists have engaged with the potential, promise and problems of art in the street when gallery spaces and museums fail to integrate modern art into a wider Moroccan cultural landscape.

The production and dissemination of knowledge on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has always had a particularly complex relationship vis-à-vis research funding, faculty hiring priorities, course scheduling schemas, and course enrollment numbers. In this essay, I hope to share some observations—that I have experienced firsthand and discussed with a number of colleagues—on teaching an introductory survey course on the history of the modern MENA region. Such reflections are rooted in my own experience of teaching at a public university with no current major research or teaching commitments to the MENA region. While these observations are not unique to the context within which I teach, they might be otherwise inflected in different contexts.

A new building for the National Library of Israel (NLI), scheduled for completion in 2021, is the culmination of a two-decade process of institutional transformation. Formerly known as the Jewish National and University Library, the NLI has historically served simultaneously as Israel's official state repository, as the Hebrew University's central library, and as a “library of the Jewish people.” Like other national libraries around the world, including elsewhere in the Middle East, the National Library of Israel has had to grapple with accelerated changes in management of library collections due to the proliferation of digital media. More fundamental, however, have been changes in the cultural expectations about how libraries should function. Since 1998, the NLI has sought to expand its mission to promote not only scholarship but also cultural “discourse” among Israel's diverse constituencies. The architectural design of NLI's new edifice was intended, therefore, to do more than house the functional requirements of a modern library. It was commissioned to express through its design the significance of the transformed institution for the Israeli public. Towards that goal, a highly publicized competition for the NLI's design was held in 2012. The original two-stage competition ended in controversy after the architect endorsed by the jurors was dismissed. Yet a review of designs submitted by four Israeli architects in that first competition shows how public spaces, affiliated with public institutions, are expected to foster public discourse in Israel. Whether that discourse is cultural or political, contentious or contradictory, these alternative designs for the NLI illustrate common themes based upon specific environmental tropes, familiar across a broad spectrum of Israeli society.

Escapism was the origin of the anthropology of the Middle East. By anthropology I mean, for the purposes of this article, the direct study of contemporaneously living peoples, not the study of extinct cultures (prehistoric archaeology, a branch of anthropology) or of the bodies of the people who lived those cultures (a major concern of physical anthropology).

When The Jubilee year of the founding of the State of Israel arrived, the market was flooded with books, periodicals, special issues, TV documentaries and albums marking the 50th anniversary. As expected, some of these products stimulated sharp controversies, as a part of recent debates over Israeli historiography, collective memory, and identity. Perhaps the most controversy was focused on the Channel One (public TV) series titled “Tkuma” (“Revival”). Contrary to expectations, the series presented the Israeli past a little bit more courageously and less canonically than the usual conservative Zionist version. It was by no means a “revisionist” history, but for the first time the general public was exposed to a more balanced and less mythical version of Israel’s history. The uprooting and expulsion of the Palestinians during the 1948 war and their transformation into a refugee camp society were briefly mentioned with some empathy. Clips from the well-known Syrian reconstruction of the massacre in Kafr Qassem were aired. In the segment on Palestinian armed struggle use was made of films from the PLO archives (captured by the Israeli secret services during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon). The discrimination and peripheralization of the immigrants from Arab countries and their violent reactions (the Wadi Salib riots and the Black Panthers’ demonstrations) were not blurred. In general, alongside the state’s great economic, cultural, and military achievements, some of the shadows were remembered as well, such as Ben-Gurion’s one-man leadership and Golda Meir’s refusal to make any territorial concessions in exchange for security arrangements (peace?). Even the inevitability of the 1967 and 1973 wars was questioned. The series was heavily attacked and accused of being anti-Zionist, especially by the right-wing establishment. The Minister of Communication, Limor Livnat, who is in charge of public broadcasting, tried to “supervise” the series and especially the segment on the PLO; however, she withdrew when she was accused of censorship.

This article examines changes in Tunisian political and societal life that allowed the country's second attempt at political opening (beginning in 2011) to introduce deeper, more long-lasting changes in its political system as compared to the first attempt (beginning in 1987).1 The article argues that three such changes in particular—the increased role of regime moderates; the development of a network of civil society groups and political activists; and the use of inclusion, negotiation, and consensus—allowed the second attempt to unfold differently. The article also briefly discusses developments in the international context between the two attempts. The article contributes to existing studies of regime change and political transition as well as to historical considerations of Tunisian political developments more broadly.

I want to kick off this discussion with three quotes and a statistic. The first quote is as follows: “The chief purpose [of historical education] is not to fill [someone's] head with a mass of material which he may perhaps put forward again when a college examiner demands its production.” The second—a line from a front page story in The New York Times—reads, “College freshmen throughout the nation reveal a striking ignorance of even the most elementary aspects of United States history.” And the third:

This essay examines the television viewing habits of Iranians since 2010, when the first of a series of crippling international sanctions were imposed on Iran after diplomatic efforts to curb the country's nuclear program stalled. Like many others in the region, viewers in Iran have been swept up by the recent wave of Turkish serials, which a new generation of offshore private networks dubbed into Persian and beamed to households with illegal satellite television dishes. These glossy melodramas provided access to consumerist utopias increasingly beyond the reach of Iranians living under the shadow of sanctions. Despite the enormous popularity of Turkish television imports with Iranian audiences, the Islamic Republic's networks managed to broadcast some successful “counter-programming” during this era of economic and political isolation. The comedy Paytakht/Capital (2011–15), more specifically, eschewed the glamour and glitz of many Turkish serials for ordinary characters living rather ordinary lives in small town Iran. In doing so, the series highlighted not only the problems that the sanctions regime created or exacerbated in Iranian society but also the virtues of remaining on the margins of a neoliberal global economic order. The essay concludes by asking how Iranian audiences might enjoy both Capital and Turkish melodramas simultaneously.