The Arab-Israeli conflict has become a touchstone of international politics and a flash point on college campuses. And yet, how do faculty teach such a contentious topic in class? Taught not only in international relations, peace and conflict resolution, politics and history, and Israel and Middle Eastern studies courses but also in literature, sociology, urban planning, law, cinema, fine art, and business-the subject guarantees wide interest among students. Faculty are challenged to deal with the subject's complexity and the sensitive dynamics it creates. The result is anxiety as they approach the task and a need for guidance. Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict edited by Rachel S. Harris is the first book designed to meet this need. Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict brings together thirty-nine essays from experienced educators who reflect on the challenges of engaging students in college classrooms. Divided into seven sections, these personal essays cover a broad range of institutional and geographical settings, as well as a wide number of academic disciplines. Some of the topics include using graphic novels and memoirs to wrestle with the complexities of Israel/Palestine, the perils of misreading in the creative writing classroom as border crossing, teaching competing narratives through film, using food to teach the Arab-Israeli conflict, and teaching the subject in the community college classroom. Each essay includes suggestions for class activities, resources, and approaches to effective teaching. Whether planning a new course or searching for new teaching ideas, this collection is an indispensable compendium for anyone teaching the Arab-Israeli conflict.

This engaging new study analyzes cinematic treatments of the Middle Ages within a diverse range of popular and artistic films.

At a time when students have more experience with watching movies than with reading and evaluating literature and history, "Cinematic Illuminations" harnesses the power of popular culture to make accessible a period that often seems forbidding and remote. From "The Seventh Seal" and "The Lion in Winter" to "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," the authors examine the ways in which the twentieth century has reimagined medieval times. Such analysis brings to life for students the literature, poetry, history, and art of the Middle Ages.

Drawing from current critical approaches to both medieval and film studies, Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman focus on two main issues of historical film. First is the inherent tension between the artifice required by film to create historical reality and the accuracy central to claims of history. Second are the ways iconography and filming conventions rewrite our understanding of the historical period portrayed in the film. In this case, the authors ask, how do contemporary representations of the Middle Ages influence cultural fantasies about our own time? Their detailed and accessible readings reveal just how strongly medieval history continues to resonate with modern audiences.

"Cinematic Illuminations" offers medievalists, literary and cultural theorists, and film theorists and buffs a fresh approach to understanding how popular culture interprets and makes use of the past through the medium of film.

"The few full-length studies of the Morte D'Arthur and other Arthurian texts published in the past 15 years have rarely reached and sustained the level of theoretical and interpretive sophistication found here. King Arthur and the Myth of History ought to have quite an impact on Arthurian studies, in part because Finke and Shichtman take medieval Arthurian literature--particularly what passes for history and chronicle--very seriously, on its own terms, in its different cultural contexts."--Kathleen Kelly, Northeastern University King Arthur and the Myth of History considers why, in the 12th century, tales of a 6th-century British king who achieved immortality in an apparently hopeless struggle to repel Saxon invaders, suddenly emerged full blown, virtually from nowhere. Further, why did this figure from the margins of the Norman empire suddenly become an important subject of historical writing at the center of that empire, and why has he since continued to be an enduring cultural icon? Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman contend that Arthur has been employed by historians as a potent but empty symbol to legitimize institutional political ambitions during times of social stress. The study focuses on three periods of cultural crisis: the Norman colonization of England in the 11th and 12th centuries, the Warsof the Roses in the 15th century, and the rise and resurgence of fascism in 20th-century Europe. It examines four English chronicles of the Norman period--those of William of Malmesbury, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and Layamon. Other chapters investigate John Hardyng's Chronicle and Malory's Morte D'Arthur, both produced during the tumult of the Wars of the Roses. Finally, it considers more contemporary texts that offer the history of Adolf Hitler's acquisition of the Holy Grail: Jean-Michel Angebert's The Occult and the Third Reich: The Mystical Origins of Nazism and the Search for the Holy Grail and Trevor Ravenscroft's Spear of Destiny. Finke and Shichtman argue that these texts reveal tensions between the claims that history makes about objectivity or referentiality and particular social, political, and ideological agendas. They demonstrate that at historical moments of great stress, the turn to antiquarianism, in an effort to bypass traumas of the recent past in favor of archaic origins, offers a unique opportunity for the literary and cultural theorists to investigate the aims and uses of history itself.

The Arab-Israeli conflict has become a touchstone of international politics and a flash point on college campuses. And yet, how do faculty teach such a contentious topic in class? Taught not only in international relations, peace and conflict resolution, politics and history, and Israel and Middle Eastern studies courses but also in literature, sociology, urban planning, law, cinema, fine art, and business-the subject guarantees wide interest among students. Faculty are challenged to deal with the subject's complexity and the sensitive dynamics it creates. The result is anxiety as they approach the task and a need for guidance. Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict edited by Rachel S. Harris is the first book designed to meet this need. Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict brings together thirty-nine essays from experienced educators who reflect on the challenges of engaging students in college classrooms. Divided into seven sections, these personal essays cover a broad range of institutional and geographical settings, as well as a wide number of academic disciplines. Some of the topics include using graphic novels and memoirs to wrestle with the complexities of Israel/Palestine, the perils of misreading in the creative writing classroom as border crossing, teaching competing narratives through film, using food to teach the Arab-Israeli conflict, and teaching the subject in the community college classroom. Each essay includes suggestions for class activities, resources, and approaches to effective teaching. Whether planning a new course or searching for new teaching ideas, this collection is an indispensable compendium for anyone teaching the Arab-Israeli conflict.