by On Barak In the autobiographical novel The Cairo House, the Egyptian-American author Samia Serageldin recalls her desire for the world outside Egypt, “a world in which you did not constantly lose the battle against dust and baksheesh.” In another work, Out of Egypt, André Aciman also expresses disgust with post-1952 Egypt, where “there are too many vagrants, too much [...]
By On Barak The sharp international response to the use of a sarin-like poison gas in Syria raises the question of why an international coalition can be mobilized following the murder of a few thousand people by means of gas but not following the killing of more than 100,000 people with conventional weapons. What chance is there for an alliance [...]
by Cyrus Schayegh December 17, 1957, Tehran. Hassan Mir-Husseini is livid. Brought before the judge for having illegally tapped into Tehran’s electricity network, he does not mince words. Did not he apply for a network subscription long time ago? Did not the state monitored company disappoint? Was not it, hence, his right to take matters into his own hands? Unimpressed, the [...]
by Eyal David "On June 5, when the first news of the Six Day War reached Tripoli, the riots broke out (...) Tripoli, the clean uthornd pleasant city, became something out of Dante’s Inferno. The air was heavy, smoky; police and soldiers armed with rifles and submachine guns were everywhere. The streets were littered with broken glass, broken objects, broken [...]
