CMES is pleased to announce Brett Levi (AM ’13) as the winner of the 2013 CMES AM Thesis Prize for his paper “Hasidic Geopolitics and the Greater Land of Israel: Israeli Hasidic Rebbes Encounter the West Bank, Gaza and Territorial Withdrawal, 1982–2013.”

For his thesis, Brett researched how Israeli Hasidic rebbes, leaders of ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects, have responded to Jewish settlement activity in the West Bank and Gaza and Israeli withdrawals from these areas. Brett visited insular Hasidic communities across Israel to find primary documents, including Hebrew and Yiddish-language...

On March 28, 2013 Professor Herbert Kelman, co-chair of the WCFIA/CMES Middle East Seminar, gave a lecture for the seminar titled “Is a Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Still Possible? The Perspective of a Strategic Optimist.” The seminar also coincided with Professor Kelman’s birthday, an occasion celebrated by co-chairs Lenore Martin and Sara Roy, and the seminar participants, with surprise kosher for Passover angel food cakes and...

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies is pleased to welcome Salim Tamari as the Spring 2013 Shawwaf Visiting Professor. Professor Tamari is professor of sociology at Birzeit University, senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies, adjunct professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, and the editor of Jerusalem Quarterly and Hawliyyat al Quds. His recent publications include ...

CMES Associate Sara Roy has published an op-ed in The Hill's Congress Blog, titled "It's worth putting Hamas to the test." Dr. Roy's research focuses primarily on the economic, social, and political development of the Gaza Strip. Her latest book Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector (Princeton University Press, 2011), was ...

Marc H. Ellis, University Professor of Jewish Studies, Professor of History, and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Baylor University, delivers the 2011 Hilda B. Silverman Lecture.... Read more about Video: Mourning for Jerusalem: The Jewish Prophetic and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

CMES Research Associate Dr. Sara Roy and her book Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (Pluto Press, 2007) were recently added to the NYTimes.com in-depth section on Gaza at http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/gaza_strip/index.html  Dr. Roy’s work concerns the Israel-Palestine conflict and she is widely regarded as the leading world expert on the political economy of the...