Recent Stories

Lebanon Still Overshadowed by Oblivion As Port Blast Aftermath Enters Fourth Year
 
Art has played an influential role in making sense of the loss felt after the August 4 explosion. Tom Young’s “Strong Angels” and other paintings show a human dimension of the tragedy and its civilian heroes, who “join forces to lift the city’s grief,” writes Darine Houmani of Diffah Three (The New Arab). “Despite all its devastation, the August 4 explosion brought greater impetus to preserve our heritage and brought about a database of our historical buildings that hadn’t been done before,” states Mona Hallak, an architect, heritage activist, and director of the American University of Beirut’s Neighborhood Initiative, as cited in The New Arab. Several weighed in on the rebuilding efforts, including Lebanese architect Jad Tabet, who proposed “rehabilitation” rather than “reconstruction,” focusing on preserving the city’s existing social fabric and inhabitants alongside the architecture (for further reading on Jad Tabet and architectural heritage, see Al Jadid, Vol. 4, No, 25, Fall 1998; Vol. 5, No. 26, Winter 1999; and Vol. 24, No. 79, 2020). As art historian and gallery owner Andrée Sfeir-Semler says, “You need to nourish people with art and culture because that is what feeds their souls.”

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Our Current Issue

On Living Twice and Belonging Nowhere:

Living Across Two Geographies of Fear and Freedom
By Naomi Pham
 
“I offer these lines to the world on behalf of all those who have left a homeland tossed about by crises and conflicts,” writes Samah Halawani in the opening lines of her essay, “I Walk ‘Here,’ Wrapped in a Screen That Relays the Events of ‘There,’” published in Al Modon. Halawani’s words speak to the complex experiences of those in exile, divided between their homeland and their new dwellings — an existential struggle between attachment and detachment. This dual existence, she states, is a difficulty that anyone who has left their homelands behind may also experience, whether they arrived in their new countries by choice or by force.
Essays and Features

A City of Many Homelands:

How 'Niyū Yūrk' Archives the Story of Middle Eastern New York
By Naomi Pham
 
A rich resource capturing the vast cultural history of New York’s MENA community over centuries, the exhibition "Niyū Yūrk: Middle Eastern and North African Lives in the City" ran from October 4, 2025, to March 8, 2026. Curated by Hiba Abid, the Curator for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, and organized by the New York Public Library, the exhibition explores the history of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) immigration to New York City from the late 19th century to the present, tracing through art, music, literature, and the slew of accomplishments made by the community the ways these emigrants planted their roots in their new home.
Essays and Features

From Asfourieh to Aftermath:

Psychiatry, the State, and the Collapse of Care in Lebanon
By Naomi Pham
 
The stigmatization of mental illness remains prevalent in the Arab world, especially surrounding psychiatric institutions like the Asfourieh Hospital, formally known as the Lebanon Hospital for the Insane, which closed its doors in 1982. While part of Asfourieh’s reputation stems from its direct associations with infamous cases like that of May Ziadeh, much of the hospital’s history has been overlooked, from its ties to the development of treatment for the mentally ill, its contributions in furthering psychiatric studies, and its role as one of the leaders in modernizing medicine in the Arab world at the time.
Essays and Features

Writing Against Defeat:

Issam Mahfouz’s Theatre, Criticism, and the Struggle for Meaning
By Naomi Pham
 
The late Lebanese playwright, poet, and critic Issam Mahfouz was known for his contributions in numerous fields, including modern poetry, journalism, and, perhaps most famously, as one of the pioneering figures of the Lebanese modern theater movement that lasted from the late 1950s up to the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. Following his death in 2006, Al Jadid published a feature article by the late Mohammad Dakroub highlighting Mahfouz’s contributions to Arab criticism. Now, 21 years after his death, many continue to recall his legacy. Alhussam Muhy al-Din’s article, “Twenty Years After the Passing of Issam Mahfouz: A Legacy That Extends Beyond the Theater,” published in Al Quds Al Arabi, rekindles appreciation for the works of this celebrated writer.
Essays and Features

Between Knowledge and the Body:

Cultured Women and the Fragmented Self in Arab Fiction
By Naomi Pham
 
Arab women have paved their own paths in the Arab social and cultural sphere throughout history — especially in the early to mid-20th century — by any means possible, whether as writers, leaders, teachers, or founders of clubs, magazines, and movements. Like in reality, women’s determination to secure their positions in fiction is layered with complex barriers. A valuable addition to the Arab critical library, Yemeni writer and researcher Huda al-Attas’ new book, “The Cultured Woman in the Arab Novel: Appropriating Masculinity and Liberating the Body” (Riad Al Rayyes Books and Publishing, 2026), examines the presence and portrayal of women in Arab fiction, going beyond superficial analyses of women as social and emotional beings to question the ways culture, knowledge, and femininity intersect with her existence. Ali Jazo reviews the book in an article for Al Modon, “The Cultured Woman’ by Huda al-Attas: The Imitation of Masculinity and the Suspended Being.”
Essays and Features

Women of the Revolutions: The New Faces of Arab Feminism

By 
Angele Ellis
 
“Nada’s Revolution” follows the tale of the 27-year Nada Ahmed, an Alexandrian woman looking to make decisions about marriage and career in the years after the revolutionary wave of the Arab Spring. In “Feminism Inshallah: A History of Arab Feminism,” Feriel Ben Mahmoud, the film’s director, traces the beginnings of feminism to male feminists such as the Egyptian Qasim Amin (1863-1908), whose nationalist aspirations for Egypt fueled his assertion that the Quran supported women’s rights — essential to throwing off the yoke of colonialism and joining the modern world.
 
Feminism Inshallah: A History of Arab Feminism
Directed by Feriel Ben Mahmoud
Women Make Movies, 2014
 
Nada’s Revolution
Directed by Claudia Lisboa
Women Make Movies, 2014
 
Two recent documentaries directed

Sin, Redemption, and Visions of Female Illness in Modern Arab Literature

By 
Bobby Gulshan
 
Hamdar’s examination of the female body in illness and suffering presents a compelling contribution to the body of literary criticism of Arabic Literature. She invokes strains of critical thought — like Foucault and the idea of discourse — using them to map the development of the image of the female body in recent Arabic literature. 

New Issue of Al Jadid

By 
Al Jadid Staff

Al Jadid is just out (Vol. 19, No. 68). The cover (“Encoded History 1” 2015) by Doris Bittar. Al Jadid is a Review & Record of Arab Culture and Arts (www.aljadid.com). As usual, the new issue is rich with essays and features, book, film and TV reviews, fiction, poetry, and a substantive editor's notebook.
ESSAYS AND FEATURES: ‘My Story With You is Different’ by Rima Assaf; ‘Sabah Zwein (1955-2014): An Innovative And Haunted Poet’ by Mike D’Andrea; 

Al Jadid is just out (Vol. 19, No. 68). The cover (“Encoded History 1” 2015) by Doris Bittar. Al Jadid is a Review & Record of Arab Culture and Arts (www.aljadid.com).

‘The Jewish Quarter:’ Ramadan Drama Revisits 40’s Egyptian-Jewish Relations

By 
Elie Chalala
 
“The Jewish Quarter” has sent some unsettling messages about the “Ramadan series” (or soaps), prompting commentaries in the Arab press and beyond, and finally meriting a feature article in the New York Times. This 30 episode serial, which runs through the month of Ramadan in Egypt, offers a viewpoint unlike that featured in any other serial before or after the Arab Spring.
 
“The Jewish Quarter” has sent some unsettling messages about the “Ramadan series” (or soaps), prompting commentaries in the Arab press and beyond, and finally meriting a feature article in the New York Times. This 30 episode serial, which runs through the month of Ramadan in Egypt, offers a viewpoint unlike that featured in any other serial before or after the Arab Spring. Its importance stems from its unprecedented and sympathetic treatment of Egypt’s Jews, highlighting their “fierce anti-Zionism” to Egyptian audiences.

Al Nakba at 67: 'Generations of Catastrophes'

By 
Elie Chalala
 
I rarely passed on an Al Nakba remembrance, an event which was pivotal in forming my political and moral consciousness during my early days in Beirut and in my academic diaspora. Nowadays, I reserve my aggravation for those intellectual cowards who saw nothing in Al Nakba except a shelter to hide from their shameful silence on one of the most horrific “Nakbas” in modern Arab history.
 
I rarely passed on an Al Nakba remembrance, an event which was pivotal in forming my political and moral consciousness during my early days in Beirut and in my academic diaspora. Nowadays, I reserve my aggravation for those intellectual cowards who saw nothing in Al Nakba except a shelter to hide from their shameful silence on one of the most horrific “Nakbas” in modern Arab history.

As 20th Century Begins, British ‘Orientalism’ a Tool of Colonialism

By 
D.W. Aossey
 
Long writes the book in a scholarly manner, but redeems it with a depth of insight and information on these fascinating personalities at a very important time in Middle Eastern history. Certainly, most will find “Reading Arabia” worth a look.
 
Reading Arabia: British Orientalism in the Age of Mass Publication 1880–1930
By Andrew C. Long
Syracuse University Press, 2014
 
The Hollywood epic, “Lawrence of Arabia,” immortalized the familiar story of T.E. Lawrence.

Orientalism’s Children: 'Voices from the Threshold'

By 
Angele Ellis
 
Nearly 11 years ago, an automobile accident on a dusty Jordanian road cut Susan Atefat-Peckham’s life and work short. The Iranian American poet, memoirist and Full bright Scholar now takes her rightful place among the likes of Gregorgy Orfalea and Sharif Elmusa with her “Talking Through the Door.” The anthology transports readers to various eras and exotic locales, going back to Ibn Hazm’s 10th-century Cordoba, the Lebanon of World War I, pre-revolutionary Iran as well as 1950s and 60s Ohio. “Readers will find that these works carry with them a power and promise so life-affirming that Lisa Suhair Majaj describes them as ‘sustenance.’”
 
Talking Through the Door: An Anthology of Contemporary Middle Eastern American Writing
Edited by Susan Atefat-Peckham
Foreword by Lisa Suhair Majaj
Syracuse University Press, 2014
 
It has been nearly eleven years since an automobile accident cut Susan Atefat-Peckham’s work and life short while she pursued a Fulbright Scholarship in

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