🅉 America’s Arab Nationalists from the Ottoman Revolution to the Rise of Hitler with Aaron Berman
America’s Arab Nationalists from the Ottoman Revolution to the Rise of Hitler
with Aaron Berman
May 21, 7pm
A one-time program summarizing his book of that name and focusing on the experiences of two of the individuals discussed. Abraham Rihbany was an Arab-American Protestant minister who served a prominent Boston congregation. Just prior to World War I Rihbany wrote a very well received and often republished book entitled The Syrian Christ. He maintained that as a Syrian himself, Rihbany had insights into Jesus’s life that the average American was blind to. Rihbany was also an early supporter of Arab nationalism and attended the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, optimistically expecting the victorious allies to create an Arab state. The story of his growing disillusion with American idealism is relevant to understanding the subsequent history of the Middle East. Elizabeth Titzel traveled to Palestine in 1922 and wrote a breathtakingly insightful and prophetic account of her trip, “The Too Promised Land.”
Titzel’s unique (for the time) insights into the developing relationships between Jews and Arabs in Palestine would be of interest to the JCA.