Land, Language, and People: Arab and Jewish Imagination in the Late Ottoman Empire

Join us for a conversation between Professors Mostafa Hussein and Eric Covey (Grand Valley State University), facilitated by Frankel Center's Interim Director for 2025-26, Deborah Dash Moore. Their discussion will be followed by a dessert reception. Virtual attendance option available for Ann Arbor audience.

Drawing from his upcoming book, "Hebrew Orientalism: Jewish Engagement with Arabo-Islamic Culture in Late Ottoman and British Palestine", Dr. Hussein will explore how Jewish writers in late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine utilized Arabo-Islamic culture. In the decades before the establishment of a Jewish state in 1948, native and immigrant Jews in Palestine mediated between Jewish and Arab cultures while navigating their evolving identities as settler colonists. Hebrew Orientalism challenges the conventional view that Hebrew thinkers were dismissive of Arabo-Islamic culture, revealing how they both adopted and adapted elements of it that enhanced their aims.

From Dr. Hussein: I am a historian specializing in modern Israel-Palestine and the neighboring Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East (19th-21st centuries), with a focus on the subfield of Jewish-Arab/Muslim studies. Trained in Judaic and Near Eastern Studies, I employ intellectual history, cultural history, and literary analysis to examine the multifaceted relations—religious, cultural, intellectual, and social—between Jews and Arabs/Muslims from medieval to modern times. A central aim of my research is to illuminate how Arab and Jewish scholars in the modern Middle East have reappropriated and repurposed their communities’ shared histories and interwoven legacies. Engaging with these historical interactions provides a rich context for understanding the enduring influence of tradition, history, and language on contemporary concerns in the region. My scholarship thus spans multiple fields and disciplines, reflecting its interdisciplinary and comparative nature.