The Arab popular uprisings of 2011 caught nearly every scholar, journalist, and foreign policy think tanker by surprise. The literature about them is already prodigious. Despite their failure to democratize the region (with the partial exception of Tunisia) or promote more equitable economic policies, the political and economic crises that impelled the uprisings and the processes of change they initiated are still underway and are unlikely to be resolved for some time. Consequently, most historians would argue that we cannot now have enough perspective or primary documentary evidence to support a nuanced analysis of the multiple intersections of structure and agency that informed the uprisings, the behind-the-scenes forces (including U.S., French, and Saudi interventions to contain or roll back the revolutionary impulses) that influenced short and medium-term outcomes, and the long-term meanings and consequences of the events for the participants and their societies. I am emphatically not suggesting that scholars should not write about these events; I have done so myself (Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, Stanford University Press, 2016). However, a certain modesty, self-critical spirit, and openness to revision is appropriate.

The field of Middle Eastern Studies has seen a recent spate of publications that offer a timely and nuanced look at the intersection of language, ideology, and visual representation in Israel-Palestine. Scholars of cultural studies, comparative literature, history, film studies, and the visual arts will appreciate the breadth of perspective offered by a combined reading of Lital Levy's Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine, Gil Z. Hochberg's Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone, and Yaron Shemer's Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel. This cluster of studies, taken as a whole, offers a coherent critical intervention into the politics of a literary and visual field marked by silences, lacunas, blind spots, and elisions. Poetic Trespass sketches the contours of a Hebrew literary landscape inhabited by a tacit Arabic presence. With a purview that extends to literature, cinema, and the plastic arts, Visual Occupations probes the tension between systemic practices of concealment and strategic modes of lending visibility. Identity, Place, and Subversion, a powerfully articulated analysis of Mizrahi cinema, interrogates the notion that ethnic difference has become irrelevant in the context of a contemporary Israeli melting pot.

Since Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri, under his nom de guere Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared the establishment of a worldwide caliphate on 29 June 2014 from the Nur al-Din Zenki Mosque in Mosul, Iraq, dozens of books have been written seeking to explain the rapid rise and breathtaking brutality of the Islamic State group. There is a certain “all hands on deck” feel to the flood of commentary on ISIS—journalists, academics, policy wonks, military figures, analysts, and politicians all have had their say. The visibility of the group, augmented by the rhetorical use to which they have been put by unrelated political debates, have perhaps made this inevitable. The four books reviewed here are part of this trend, and their collective strength is in their breadth and factual detail. There is information aplenty, and all the books included in this review do an admirable job, each in its own way, of detailing the history of the organization. The Islamic State group's deft use of online propaganda, its place in the post-9/11 jihadi landscape, its territorial gains and losses, and its prodigious ability, until recently, to draw large numbers of recruits into Syria or online support roles, have all received detailed treatment.

The Syrian Civil War, now in its sixth year, has displaced an estimated 11 million people (with numbers constantly escalating), nearly half the country's population. Of these, the United Nations estimates 4.8 million Syrians have fled their homeland. News reports have tended to focus on the struggles of those crossing the Mediterranean and seeking asylum in Europe, but most refugees have sought safety in the neighboring countries of Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, where they have dispersed and “settled” in towns and cities. A comparative few have settled in host government and/or UNHCR sponsored camps. Jordan's Za‘atari Camp, just seven miles from the border, is the largest Syrian refugee camp. Its population peaked at more than 120,000 residents and currently has between 75,000 – 80,000 residents most of whom are from the Dara'a area. The camp is numerically equivalent to Jordan's fourth largest city.