Cheryl A. Rubenberg, independent analyst and former associate professor of political science at Florida International University, died on 16 June 2017 at age seventy-one. Born and raised in Pennsylvania, she earned her bachelor's in political science from Hunter College, her master's in international relations from Johns Hopkins University, and her Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Miami (1979). After a year at Florida Atlantic University, she joined the political science faculty at Florida International University. A student who took her class on American government wrote that Professor Rubenberg “changed my life forever” by exposing the business interests that motivate leaders of American government and media.

Pioneering author and media critic, Dr. Jack Shaheen devoted his life to identifying and contesting damaging stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims in American media and pop culture. Arabs and Muslims were offered up as cartoon caricatures—dagger wielding, evil, ridiculous, hypersexualized, inhumane and incompetent “others.” Dr. Shaheen quickly recognized their shared genealogy to the portrayals of other racialized groups including Jews, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and African Americans. Always in the spirit of engaged dialogue, he was outspoken in defense of any group that was wrongfully stereotyped and vilified.

Since the 1950s, historiographical trends in scholarship have re-considered the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent nation-state building of the Republic of Turkey. The social and political evolution of the imperial system into a nation-state has been alternatively explained through geopolitical pressures, domestic resistance, the expanding economy and modernism in Europe, and the inability of the Ottoman establishment to cope with the rapid changes of the nineteenth century. Constructing one holistic narrative of a vast time period of upheaval is a difficult endeavor for any scholar. In the case of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Republic of Turkey, ethno-religious networks, two world wars, geopolitical competition between the great powers, regional and pan-regional insurgencies, demographic displacement, nationalist fervor sweeping through the Balkan and Arab provinces and into Anatolia, and finally the Kurdish armed resistance renders succinct historical narratives all but impossible to achieve. Thus, while there are many stories of the end of the Ottoman Empire, an overview of the issues for students and general audiences is a much needed, but audacious, undertaking. Yet for understanding the Middle East and Southeastern Europe today, a critical narrative must be told in all its complexity.

In 1980 Muhammad Malas began research for a documentary about Palestinians in the refugee camps of Lebanon. Malas, who had received training in filmmaking at the All Soviet Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow, had already worked for a decade directing documentaries for Syrian television. He researched and filmed in Lebanon during long visits in 1980 and 1981, but his work was interrupted by the Israeli attacks on Lebanon in 1981 and 1982 and the Camps War that raged in the refugee camps of the southern suburbs of Beirut in the mid-1980s. Al-Manam (The Dream) was finally completed in 1987. It was highly acclaimed in a few venues in Europe and the Arab world, but was not widely released. Over the years the film has screened at festivals here and there, but otherwise has been difficult to see and impossible to purchase. Now, The Dream has finally been released on DVD by mec film, and an English language translation of the diary Malas kept while filming in 1980–81 and which appeared in Arabic in 1991 has been published by the American University in Cairo Press. The near simultaneous release of these two works, a formally important work of Arab cinema and a detailed accounting of the thoughts of the filmmaker as he conceptualized that work, is an exciting development for Arab film studies—a boon to both scholarship and classroom teaching.