Summary
Loren D. Lybarger’s ethnographic history of Palestinian Chicago, which he presents as the single largest concentration of Palestinians in North America at approximately 85,000, argues that a religious turn since the 1990s — principally toward Islam, with a parallel Christian sectarian response — did not displace secular nationalism but interacted with it to produce hybrid, syncretic identities shaped by homeland and diaspora processes together, and by race, class, gender, generation and space in Chicago (Palestinian Chicago — Identity in Exile, PDF p.26-30). Part 1 gives the front matter, the Foreword by series editor Beshara Doumani, the Acknowledgments, the Introduction in full, and Chapter 1 through the opening of its account of the post-1967 “re-Palestinianization” of the community (PDF p.1-62).
What the file is
The 2020 University of California Press (Oakland) Luminos open-access edition, © 2020 by Loren Lybarger, licensed CC BY-NC-SA, DOI https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.90 (PDF p.2, p.7). LCCN 2019053432; ISBN 9780520337619 (paperback), 9780520974401 (ebook); LCC E184.P33 L93 2020 (PDF p.7). 286 PDF pages, about 128,519 words; printed pagination runs from the front matter (roman numerals to xvii) through the Introduction and chapters, with the Index ending at printed p.245 in the Contents listing (PDF p.12). It is no. 1 in the New Directions in Palestinian Studies series (PDF p.5). The text copy carries === PDF p.N === markers for all 286 pages and is legible; PDF p.1, 3, 9, 13, 15 and 21 are blank in it. Access basis: open-license (CC BY-NC-SA), as printed at PDF p.7.
Section by section
Front matter (PDF p.1-14)
Luminos statement, series page, title page, copyright/cataloguing, dedication to his daughter Rachel and his parents Lee and Connie Lybarger, Contents and List of Illustrations (PDF p.2-14). The Contents gives: Introduction printed p.1; Chapter 1, Palestinian Chicago: Spatial Location, Historical Formation, p.29; Chapter 2, Secularism in Exile, p.58; Chapter 3, The Religious Turn: American Muslims for Palestine, p.85; Chapter 4, The Religious Turn: Generational Subjectivities, p.108; Chapter 5, Dynamic Syntheses: Reversion, Conversion, and Accommodation, p.133; Chapter 6, Dynamic Syntheses: Rebellion, Absolute and Spiritual, p.159; Conclusion p.185; Notes p.199; References p.225; Index p.245 (PDF p.10-12). Illustrations include the traditional and Islamized Palestinian flags alongside the US flag, the Dome of the Rock flag, and a map of British Mandate Palestine, 1922-1948 (PDF p.14).
Foreword by the Series Editor (PDF p.16-17 / printed p.xiii-xiv)
Beshara Doumani, as series editor, frames the Palestinian condition as an ongoing process of dispossession, displacement and statelessness, with “the ethnic cleansing of the overwhelming majority of Palestinians from their native land in 1948” as at once the key reference point for the Palestinian political imagination and a centrifuge of life trajectories; roughly half of the twelve million Palestinians still live in pre-1948 Palestine, and the other six million or so constitute the oldest refugee population in the world (PDF p.16-17). He presents this book as an intimate portrait of the largest Palestinian community in the United States, based on years of ethnographic fieldwork, tracing journeys and activism across the secular/religious divide and the religious turn near the end of the twentieth century (PDF p.17).
Acknowledgments (PDF p.18-20 / printed p.xv-xvii)
Lybarger thanks the participants in Palestinian Chicago — some named, some under pseudonyms — especially Hatem Abudayyeh, Nicholas Dahdal, Oussama Jammal, Maha Jarad, Rami Nashashibi and Camelia Odeh for insight, institutional access and introductions; Ohio University colleagues and assistants; readers including Maha Nassar, Atalia Omer and Sherene Seikaly; and Martin Riesebrodt, who died on December 6, 2014, during the fieldwork (PDF p.18-19). Funding: Ohio University Research Council for exploratory fieldwork in 2010-2011, two NEH awards, an Ohio University Faculty Fellowship Leave, back-to-back Martin Marty Center senior fellowships, and Ohio University and Carnegie Foundation support for open-access publishing (PDF p.19-20). He states sole responsibility for errors and that the book is only one possible portrayal, a departure point rather than a final statement (PDF p.20).
Introduction — Protesting “Protective Edge,” Chicago, July 26, 2014 (PDF p.22-25 / printed p.1-4)
In July 2014 Israel bombarded Gaza in Operation Protective Edge, “the third since 2008” attempt to destroy Hamas’s military and governing capacities, an attack which, as printed, “killed more than 2,000 civilians and injured an additional 11,000” (PDF p.22). The Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine called a Loop demonstration; mosques bussed hundreds from the southwest suburbs; organizers claimed 15,000 demonstrators and the local NBC affiliate put the figure at 8,000 (PDF p.22). Traditional and two Islamized Palestinian flags — one inscribing the shahada on the white field, one superimposing the Dome of the Rock with “filastin kulluha qudsun” (“Palestine, All of It [is] Sanctified”) — appeared alongside the US flag, signaling a Palestinian claim to American political citizenship (PDF p.22). Chants demanded an end to killing, called the attack “genocide”, called for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel’s “apartheid”, and revived “from the [Jordanian] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea / Palestine will be free!” (PDF p.23-24). Interviewees presented a united secular-religious front: AMP media staff Kristin Szremski, “I believe Israel needs to end the occupation. Period.”; AAAN executive director Hatem Abudayyeh, “The Palestinian people want peace. Absolutely. We always have. But, peace with justice”; student Deena Kishawi; and Lynn Pollack of Jewish Voice for Peace (PDF p.24-25). Behind the apparently seamless synthesis lay a longer history of tension and shift (PDF p.25).
Introduction — The Project; Questions and Data (PDF p.26-28 / printed p.5-7)
Palestinian Chicago, at approximately 85,000, is presented as the single largest concentration of Palestinians in North America; the community has faced Chicago Tribune exposés and, since the 1970s, FBI and Department of Justice probes, and since the election of Donald J. Trump its activists have led protests against the “Muslim Ban” (PDF p.26). Lybarger’s own formation runs through volunteer English teaching in the West Bank (1986-89) during the First Intifada, work with the Palestinian Human Rights Information Center in East Jerusalem after the military closure of all schools in early 1988, teaching in Gaza (1991-93), and dissertation fieldwork in Palestine in 1999-2000 (PDF p.26-27). In Chicago he was introduced to the Arab Community Center (Chicago) (the markaz), the secular-left, pan-Arab anchor of the Southwest Side enclave since the early 1970s, and noticed younger staff and youth adopting outward markers of Islamic piety; at a 1998 fundraising dinner for the Arab American Action Network, which had replaced the markaz, university students interrupted the program to perform the maghrib prayer as keynote speaker Edward Said waited at the podium, palpably transforming the mood of a secular, nonsectarian event (PDF p.27-28). By the 2000s the secular centers had closed, suburban mosques flourished, and the AAAN had accommodated the shift (PDF p.28). Four questions orient the project — the factors shaping Palestinian identities in Chicago; Islam’s ascendancy since the 1990s and secularism’s fate; the identity forms emerging from religious-secular intersections; and the case’s wider perspectives — answered from summer research trips in 2010-2013, a two-year residency in 2013-15, site observations, and more than eighty recorded life-story interviews of two or more hours (PDF p.28).
Introduction — Main Assertions; Contextualizing the Religious Shift (PDF p.28-40 / printed p.7-19)
First assertion: the religious turn results from homeland and diaspora processes together — Islamist competitors to the PLO since the late 1980s, principally the Muslim Brotherhood and its successor Hamas, which since 2007 has dominated Gaza while Fateh remains in nominal control of parts of the West Bank, influencing Chicago through family networks; and diaspora factors including religious institution-building in selective assimilation, the shuttering of secular nationalist centers, wealth accumulation and suburban transition, and the anti-Muslim backlash after September 11, 2001 (PDF p.28-29). Second: the shift generated hybrid identities; secularism transmuted rather than disappeared, new religious orientations bear secularism’s imprint, and Palestinian Christians show analogs, with race, class, gender, generation and space shaping the dynamics (PDF p.29). Third: diaspora identity will keep developing in multiple directions, and the Chicago case gives empirical depth to Taylor (2007), Martin (2014) and Riesebrodt (2014) on the religious and secular in a mutually “fragilizing” relation (PDF p.29-30).
The contextual history contrasts secular nationalism — organized around the ethnos, a shared Arabic language and the ‘adat wa taqalid, a narrative of loss and thawra from the traumas of 1948, 1967, the 1982 Lebanon invasion (in which, citing Chomsky, close to 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, 90 percent of them civilians, died and the PLO was expelled from Beirut), and the two Intifadas, and a claim to the territory of the former British Mandate (PDF p.30, p.32) — with Islamism, oriented to the Umma and sovereignty in Palestine centered on Jerusalem and the mi’raj, from Izz al-Din al-Qassam and Hasan al-Banna through the Brotherhood’s backing of al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni and its fighters in the 1948 war, “during which approximately 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled”, to Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s al-jihad fi sabil illah against Fatah’s al-kifah al-musallah, and the divergent invocations of Palestine by al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (PDF p.32-33). Hamas’s 2007 expulsion of Fatah from Gaza split the Palestinian National Authority; an incipient sectarianizing reaction among some Palestinian Christians followed (PDF p.33-34). In the diaspora the homeland split does not map directly: diaspora and homeland influence each other in both directions, assimilation transforms identities, and diaspora Palestinians confront belonging where they live, with identities overlapping and hyphenating around narratives of “return” (al-‘awda) (PDF p.34-35). In Chicago the student structures — the Organization of Arab Students (1952), the General Union of Palestinian Students (1959) and the Association of Arab American University Graduates (1967) — forged national identity in the 1970s-1980s, while Muslim Student Association chapters, present since 1963, rejected nationalist activism as “secular”; by the 1990s Cainkar observed halal markets, closing nationalist centers, and mosque attendance at Bridgeview’s Mosque Foundation rising from an average of 75 at Friday prayers in 1982 to nearly 2,000 every week in 1994 (PDF p.35-36). Against accounts attributing the turn chiefly to racist reaction (Cainkar 2004), Lybarger insists Islam in a specific community is “a contingent and internally complex element within a broader social field”, shaped by organizations, institutions, events, spatial processes and generational, class and gender dynamics, and that the shift is “not an inexorable, single-track process of awakening” (PDF p.36-38).
Introduction — Key Concepts (PDF p.38-49 / printed p.17-28)
Identity is defined as an emergent sense of self and other forming narratively as “stories so far” (Massey 2005, 130) across epochal-historical, autobiographical, generational, structural and spatial axes; epochal crises (the wars of 1948 and 1967, the 1982 invasion, the First Intifada) form generational cohorts that split into synchronic “generational units” (Mannheim 1952, 304) — most profoundly along the Islamist-secular-nationalist cleavage — institutionalized in families, associations, parties and bodies like the Red Crescent Society (PDF p.38-40). Space, following Massey, is a “coexisting heterogeneity” that is “always in the process of being made”; diaspora and homeland spaces imbricate, and September 11, 2001 has a particular salience in the US diaspora space (PDF p.40-41). Four Chicago spatial dynamics follow: interaction with other groups, from conflicted shopkeeper relations with African American communities to 1960s-1970s solidarity with the Black Panther Party and Black Power, renewed in Black Lives Matter — in 2014 Chicago Palestinian activists traveled to Ferguson after the police killing of Michael Brown, and AAAN youth have since collaborated with BLM chapters (PDF p.41); class and the suburban transition, which interlocutors themselves call a version of “white flight”, reconfiguring Palestinians’ interstitial position (PDF p.41-43); life between the shatat and the iblad, with summers or school years spent in Palestine producing intergenerational bifocality (PDF p.43); and gender, the religious shift reinforcing a patriarchal “respectability” that universities, shelters and even anti-patriarchal readings learned in MSA chapters contest (PDF p.43-44).
Secularism and religion are treated as ideal-types: secularism encompasses any orientation that “implicitly or explicitly resists, rejects, demotes, ignores, or otherwise suspends, momentarily or permanently, the prior claim of religious authority”, while religion presumes “the existence, power, and authority of superhuman forces” and access to them against crises in body, nature and society (Riesebrodt 2010) (PDF p.44-45). Hybridity, in Lybarger’s broader use against postcolonial usage (Bhabha 1994), is what happens to orientations through the crossing of social circles; its religious-secular form is Syncretic secularity (Eipper 2011), and against state-centered accounts (Asad; Mahmood) he holds that “the religious and the secular exist […] in a continuing dialectic that engender[s] any number of transformations” (Martin 2014, 16) — there are multiple secularisms and secularities (PDF p.45-46). The Organization of the Book previews Chapters 1-6 and the Conclusion as summarized in the reading notes (PDF p.47-49).
Chapter 1 — opening and Early Migration, 1890s-1940s (PDF p.50-56 / printed p.29-35)
Chapter 1 opens: before the 1990s suburban exodus the hub was a southwest corridor from South Kedzie Avenue and West 63rd Street, with a smaller North Side settlement; three community centers anchored the Southwest Side in the 1970s-1980s; Palestinians worked as peddlers, factory hands and small business owners, and after moving to the suburbs commuted back to stores serving African American and Latinx communities, inserting themselves between suburban white ethnics and the black and brown city — a borderland exile inflected by Chicago’s racial and economic segregation (PDF p.50). Early migration is set in industrial Chicago — population from 109,000 in 1860 to 1.1 million by 1890; the Black Belt along State Street, its segregation enforced by covenants and vigilante violence, with twenty-three blacks and fifteen whites killed in the 1919 race riot (PDF p.51-52) — and in Greater Syria’s integration into a global market economy: of approximately 100,000 Syrians admitted between 1899 and 1921, fewer than 6 percent came from the Jerusalem and Ramallah regions, mostly Ramallah Christians at first, then Christian and Muslim peasants from mixed villages; the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 and its 1867 amendment concentrated land, broke up the musha’ system and opened contiguous holdings to the nascent Zionist movement and the Yishuv, driving young men to Haifa and Chicago (PDF p.52). The migrants’ bimodal pattern — years of work, return to build a house and marry, then back alone — in the mahjar counteracted assimilation; by 1912 some 150 mostly young Arab men lived in boarding houses near Michigan Avenue and 18th Street as “an exclusively male community of peddlers”; between 1920 and 1935 their stores multiplied along the Black Belt’s edge, making them a “middle minority” or “stranger” group catering chiefly to African American customers, with relations ranging from stereotyping and violent conflict to the Beitunia immigrants’ Arab Club meeting in the Nation of Islam’s “Negro Muslim Temple” at 824 East 43rd Street and, in al-Tahir’s claim, no class or racial tension at all (PDF p.53-54). Other Arab immigrants, chiefly Christians from present-day Lebanon and Syria, sought permanence and, from 1909, litigated to count as “Caucasian”, winning in Dow v. United States (1915) a ruling that Syrians “were so related to their neighbors on the European side of the Mediterranean that they should be classed as white”, though the 1929 lynching of Nola Romey showed a status that could shift violently (PDF p.54). Early-wave life was twelve-hour days behind counters, coffee houses named Mecca, Arabian Nights and Scheherazade, monthly meetings on the conflict with Zionism, earnings of 15,000 a year, and a pious elder’s complaint that merchants had forgotten the shahada, drank alcohol and ate pork; most men married in their villages and returned alone, a handful taking American common-law wives, return with wealth an obligation whose failure was dishonorable — “It is very hard to be a good man in this bad land” (PDF p.55-56).
Chapter 1 — Migration, 1948-1967 (PDF p.56-60 / printed p.35-39)
The war of 1948 “forced approximately 750,000 Palestinians into statelessness” and transformed the bimodal pattern: fewer than one hundred Palestinians arrived in Chicago between 1936 and 1938, while immigration to the United States averaged 660 per year between 1948 and 1967, chiefly wives, children and extended family on Jordanian passports; by 1950 more than five hundred Palestinians were resident in Chicago (PDF p.56). Imm ‘Umar’s parents exemplify the migration chain: her father arrived in 1939 after the 1936-39 revolt, peddled with his uncle’s help, returned to Beitunia to marry in 1947, and her mother followed through Beirut after the 1948 war with their first child; families now settled in Chicago, shifting south and west into Chicago Lawn, Marquette Park and Gage Park as an interstitial buffer (PDF p.56-57). Most post-1948 immigrants were Muslims from Beitunia; Ramallah Christians numbered some 1,500 emigrants to the United States by 1946 — roughly one-fifth of the town’s Christian population — of whom forty were in Chicago, rising to 350 within two decades; Muslims and Christians lived and congregated separately, reinforced sectarian endogamy within patrilocal, place-based kin groupings (PDF p.57-58). The Children of Beitunia Club (1924), renamed the Arab Club after 1948, and its offshoots taught Arabic and “Islamic values”, aided 1948 refugees and sent $20,000 in the early 1950s to build a Beitunia elementary school; the Ramallah Club’s Chicago chapter (1957) aimed, in a leader’s words, “not to melt in [sic] the American society, but to preserve our heritage”, its dabka and dress marking turath as national patrimony (PDF p.58). Formal religious organization was weak in both segments: Christians relied on itinerant priests, then coalesced around what became St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church (Cicero) in Cicero, whose welcome Imm George recalled — “It was amazing!”; Muslims’ practice was individualized, Oschinsky reporting of Ramadan in August 1946 that “Not more than ten men kept the fast”, and al-Tahir confirming low observance alongside professed loyalty to Islam, with 1950s banquet-hall feasts and collection toward a mosque that culminated, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in the Mosque Foundation (PDF p.59-60).
Chapter 1 — The New Immigrants and “Re-Palestinianization”, opening (PDF p.60-62 / printed p.39-41)
The war of 1967, two years after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished the quotas in effect since 1921, shifted the community’s size, composition, ethos and cohesion, while backlash after the 1967 and 1973 wars, the LA Eight case (the FBI’s 1987 Los Angeles arrests over alleged PFLP ties, whose twenty-year prosecution effort failed), the INS’s 1986 Alien Terrorists and Undesirables: A Contingency Plan proposing concentration camps for legal resident aliens from eight Arab countries, the mid-1980s bill to close the PLO’s UN Observer Mission, and the aftermaths of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and September 11, 2001 turned the sojourner/stranger ethos into a collective sense of exile (PDF p.60-62). The 1967 war expelled approximately 250,000 Palestinians from the newly occupied areas; West Bank emigration jumped from approximately 3 percent to 20 percent of the populace, more than 50 percent of the emigrants women and children, driven by military rule and land expropriation for Jewish-only settlements (PDF p.61). Beside chain immigrants — whose remittances had built “the American quarter” back home — a substantial “new peasant” population settled in Marquette Park as peddlers and store owners, outnumbering the chain immigrants and, mobilizing tradition and nationalism as authenticity against them, preserving the ‘adat wa taqalid through women’s labor in the home in a gendered process that “re-Palestinianized” the community; the section breaks off mid-sentence at the end of PDF p.62 (PDF p.61-62).
Key passages
- “I believe Israel needs to end the occupation. Period. And that’s how we’re going to achieve peace” (Kristin Szremski, quoted from Waldroup 2014) (Palestinian Chicago — Identity in Exile, PDF p.24 / printed p.3).
- “The Palestinian people want peace. Absolutely. We always have. But, peace with justice” (Hatem Abudayyeh, quoted from Waldroup 2014) (PDF p.24 / printed p.3).
- “It is very hard to be a good man in this bad land” (an early immigrant, quoted from Oschinsky 1947, 34) (PDF p.55 / printed p.34).
- “Not more than ten men kept the fast” (Oschinsky 1947, on Ramadan, August 1946) (PDF p.59 / printed p.38).
- “the objectives of the organization are: (1) to help each other here, (2) not to melt in [sic] the American society, but to preserve our heritage and (3) to help Ramallah people back home” (a Ramallah Club leader, quoted from Zaghel 1976, 49) (PDF p.58 / printed p.37).
Evidence the work relies on
Ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago: summer research trips in 2010-2013 and a two-year residency in 2013-15, site observations at mosques, churches, community centers, protests and events, and more than eighty recorded life-story interviews of two or more hours (PDF p.28). For the Introduction’s opening, NBC coverage of the July 26, 2014 demonstration (Waldroup 2014) and Dearden 2014 (PDF p.22-25). For Chapter 1’s early history, the earlier Chicago studies the book synthesizes and quotes: Oschinsky 1947, al-Tahir 1952, Zaghel 1976, Cainkar 1988 and 1998, Serhan 2009, Abu-Lughod 1999, Gualtieri 2009 and Pennock 2017, each credited in place (PDF p.51-62). Theoretical framing from Massey 2005 on space and narrative, Mannheim 1952 on generational units, Riesebrodt 2010 on religion, and Martin 2014 on the secular-religious dialectic (PDF p.38-46).
Analysis
The work’s method in the part read is ethnographic and historical: a programmatic Introduction that states its assertions, concepts and chapter plan in advance, followed by a Chapter 1 built largely as a synthesis of prior Chicago field studies (Oschinsky, al-Tahir, Zaghel, Cainkar) into a spatial history, with the author’s own interviews (Imm ‘Umar, Imm George) introduced as illustrations. Its perspective is explicit: secularism and religion are ideal-types whose lived interaction, not either’s triumph, is the object, and homeland developments are not permitted to explain the diaspora without diaspora-specific mechanisms. Its limits in this part are those of the framing itself: the community’s size, the casualty and attendance figures and the early historical quantities are carried from the sources cited in place, not independently established, and Chapter 1’s remaining sections and Chapters 2-6, where the interview evidence is presented, are not yet read.
People, organizations, places and events
People: Loren D. Lybarger · Beshara Doumani · Hatem Abudayyeh · Edward Said · Izz al-Din al-Qassam · Yasir Arafat Organizations: Palestine Liberation Organization · Fateh · Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine · Hamas · Muslim Brotherhood · Arab Community Center (Chicago) · Arab American Action Network · American Muslims for Palestine · Mosque Foundation · Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine · St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church (Cicero) · Jewish Voice for Peace · Black Lives Matter Places: Palestinian Chicago · Chicago · Beitunia · Ramallah · Bridgeview Events: Operation Protective Edge · First Intifada · Second Intifada · LA Eight
Concepts
Secularism · Religious turn · Syncretic secularity · Umma · Palestinian Arab diaspora
How it relates to other sources
Where other ingested works treat the diaspora from Palestine outward, this book reverses the direction for one community: its account of the PLO’s weakening after the Gulf War and Oslo hollowing out secular nationalist institutions is the diaspora-side counterpart to the homeland narratives in, for example, Rethinking Statehood in Palestine and Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine, and its early-migration history overlaps the pre-1948 mahjar treated in The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918–1947, which it does not cite in the part read. Its foreword is by Beshara Doumani, author of Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900 and series editor for Rethinking Statehood in Palestine as well.
Open questions
- The Foreword calls the book Palestinian Chicago: Identities in Exile (plural “Identities”, PDF p.17), while the title page, series page and suggested citation all give Identity in Exile (singular, PDF p.5-7). Both forms are held as printed.
- The Introduction states as printed that Operation Protective Edge “killed more than 2,000 civilians and injured an additional 11,000” (PDF p.22); the figure is recorded as the book’s claim, attributed in place to Dearden 2014 and Waldroup 2014, and is not reconciled with other accounts.
- The Introduction’s account of the 1982 Lebanon invasion gives “close to 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, 90 percent of them civilians” killed, citing Chomsky 1999 [1983], 388 (PDF p.30); held as cited, not reconciled.
- The Introduction states, in its Muslim Brotherhood passage, that during the war of 1948 “approximately 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their towns and villages in what became Israel” (PDF p.33 / printed p.12), and Chapter 1 states separately that the war of 1948 “forced approximately 750,000 Palestinians into statelessness” (PDF p.56 / printed p.35); Chapter 1 also states the war of 1967 produced a further exodus of approximately 250,000 (PDF p.61). The 1948 figure thus appears twice in the part read, once in each place, and all three figures are held as the book’s, with their cited sources, and not reconciled with figures in other ingested works.
- Al-Tahir is quoted in Chapter 1 both reporting bigoted attitudes among Palestinian shopkeepers toward African American customers and claiming later in the same study that there was no class or racial tension between the communities (PDF p.53-54, citing al-Tahir 1952, 122 and 193); the book presents both without resolving them, and they are held side by side here.
- Chapter 1’s account breaks off mid-sentence at PDF p.62, in the middle of the “re-Palestinianization” section’s account of women’s labor in the home; the rest of Chapter 1 is read in part 2.
Coverage
Partial — PDF p.1-62 of 286 read (part 1 of 7). Remaining: part 2, PDF p.63-103; part 3, PDF p.104-144; part 4, PDF p.145-184; part 5, PDF p.185-224; part 6, PDF p.225-267; part 7, PDF p.268-286.