Jews and Muslims in the Arab World: Haunted by Pasts Real and Imagined

Jews and Muslims in the Arab World highlights the effects of historical memory on the Arab-Israel conflict, demonstrating that both Jews and Arabs use stories of distant pasts to create their identities and shape their politics. Whether real or imagined, the past filtered through their collective memories has had and will continue to have enormous influence on how Jews and Arabs perceive themselves and each other. Jews and Muslims in the Arab World describes the ways in which the past is absorbed, internalized, and then processed among Jews and Arabs. The book stresses the importance of historical imagination on the current evolving political cultures, but does not claim that explanations from an ancient past shed light on every aspect of contemporary events.

Jacob Lassner is professor of Jewish civilization in the departments of history and religion at Northwestern University. He is the author of seven books, most recently, The Middle East Remembered: Forged Identities, Competing Narratives, Contested Spaces and numerous articles on Jewish-Muslim relations and Near Eastern History. S. Ilan Troen is the Karl, Harry, and Helen Stoll Chair in Israel Studies at Brandeis University and the Sam and Anna Lopin Professor in Modern History, emeritus, at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is the founding editor of Israel Studies (Indiana University Press), the leading journal in the field, and the author or editor of ten books on American, Jewish and Israeli History. His most recent book is Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement.