“Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads,” goes the adage. At the Cairo International Book Fair, where hundreds of publishers and thousands of readers gather each winter, everybody writes, publishes, and reads. While the sclerotic institutions of state-funded culture remain conservative forces with an outsized role in Egyptian letters, independent publishers continue to push the […]
ICWA is thrilled to announce that recent Fellow Malia Politzer’s article ‘The 21st Century Gold Rush: How the Refugee Crisis is Changing the World Economy‘ has won both a National Magazine Award and and an award from the Overseas Press Club. Politizer was a ICWA Fellow from 2013-2015 based in Spain and wrote about the […]
Past Fellow Neri Zilber (@NeriZilber), a journalist and adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Tel Aviv, talks about how Israelis and Palestinians are reacting to Trump’s first 10 days in office. Listen now. […]
Like any other spiritual or human endeavor, Islam is a plurality resounding in harmonies and, at times, disharmonies. I began learning about this faith and its people as a college freshman in 2001. As a journalism student at the University of Missouri, I was asked to reflect critically on media packages that paired footage of […]
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us… And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own […]
FOREIGN POLICY (Jan 20, 2017) –Past Fellow Neri Zilber explains how the Israeli government is anticipating the Trump Presidency. […]
One “is either a Cairo person—Arab, Islamic, serious, international, intellectual—or an Alexandria amateur—Levantine, cosmopolitan, devious, and capricious,” the scholar Edward Said once wrote.[1] I must be both. Over the past decade, I have had a love affair with Alexandria. Exit from the train station, and pop into a little toy taxi, a Russian-made Lada, that […]
In the January issue of Le Monde Diplomatique, Fellow Jonathan Guyer examines the connections between fine and comic art in Egypt and the wider Middle East. “On the Arab Page” “That comics are often dismissed as childish gives contemporary artists more space to address politically disruptive topics,” he writes. The richly illustrated essay elaborates on […]
Read Past Fellow Andrew Rice’s excellent article in New York Magazine on Jared Kushner’s rise to unimaginable power. […]
Aside from the tragic loss of life, there are perhaps larger security and political implications to this latest event in Jersalem. Read Past Fellow Neri Zilber‘s latest dispatch in the Daily Beast. […]