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Searing images of suicide bombings and retaliatory strikes now define the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for many Westerners, but television and print media are not the only visual realms in which the conflict is playing out. Even tourist postcards and greeting cards have been pressed into service as vehicles through which Israelis and Palestinians present competing visions of national selfhood and conflicting claims to their common homeland.

In this book, Tim Jon Semmerling explores how Israelis and Palestinians have recently used postcards and greeting cards to present images of the national self, to build national awareness and reinforce nationalist ideologies, and to gain international acceptance. He discusses and displays the works of numerous postcard/greeting card manufacturers, artists, and photographers and identifies the symbolic choices in their postcards, how the choices are arranged into messages, what the messages convey and to whom, and who benefits and loses in these presentations of national self. Semmerling convincingly demonstrates that, far from being ephemeral, Israeli and Palestinian postcards constitute an important arena of struggle over visual signs and the power to produce reality.

Inaugural volume in the new series Transregional Middle Easts

As Istanbul faces mounting ecological pressures—from the recently proclaimed “death” of the Marmara Sea to deforestation driven by mega-infrastructure, rising sea levels, and the threat of a major earthquake—this volume argues that environmental history is essential to understanding the city’s predicaments. Coedited by K. Mehmet Kentel and Onur İnal, it bridges urban and environmental history, foregrounding nonhuman actors, ecological processes, and material landscapes, while challenging how the concept of “the City” has been defined and contested. Appropriately the first volume in the series Transregional Middle Easts, Istanbul Unbound integrates environmental dynamics, recognizes fluid boundaries, and centers nonhuman agents in urban transformation, revealing the inseparable entanglement of urban life and regional environmental change in one of the world’s most dynamic metropolises.