FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SAN LUIS OBISPO -- Cal Poly Pomona History Professor Mahmood Ibrahim
and Israeli peace activist Susy Mordechay will kick off a new Cal Poly
speaker series on the history of the Middle East and the current crisis
there at 6 p.m. Jan. 27 in Chumash Auditorium on campus.
The series is being offered as part of a history course taught by
Professor Manzar Foroohar.
Ibrahim, chair of the History Department at the Pomona campus, will
speak on the "Historical Context of the Conflict and Prospects for
Peace in the Middle East."
Mordechay will discuss "The Assault on Palestinian Civilian Life,
2000-2002."
Ibrahim was born in the West Bank town of Ramallah and immigrated to
the United States in 1966. He earned a bachelor's degree from the City
College of New York in 1973 and earned a master's in 1974 and a
doctorate in 1981 from UCLA.
Ibrahim was awarded two Fulbright-Hays Fellowships and a National
Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to pursue his research and
studies of Islamic science. He was a visiting lecturer at UCLA and UC
Riverside before going to Bir Zeit University on the West Bank, where
he served as chair of the Department of History, Geography and
Political Science from 1985 to 1989.
He is the author of two books, "Merchant Capital and Islam" and "The
Oral History of the Intifada," which he worked on with Tom Ricks and
Adel Yahya of the Tamir Institute in Jerusalem. The book contains a
collection of interviews conducted with young men who "moved the
street" during the first intifada (the Palestinian uprising) and an
analysis of their observations.
He has also written numerous articles and book reviews on the Middle
East and North Africa, from the rise of Islam to the present.
Mordechay was born in Austria to parents who were refugees during World
War II and who had lost their family in the Holocaust. She was raised
and educated in Israel, where she earned a degree from the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem. Later, she worked on her graduate program in
linguistics at UCLA.
Since her return to Israel in 1992, she has pursued the cause of
Palestinian rights and a just peace, according to Foroohar. In the past
few years she has worked with various Israeli groups, including the
Committee Against Home Demolitions, the Coalition of Women for a Just
Peace, and Ta'ayush, an Arab-Jewish Partnership. During the current
intifada, she has done extensive work in the occupied territories.
The Middle East speaker series will continue on Feb. 3 with a talk on
Zionism by Hagit Borer, professor and chair of the Linguistics
Department at USC, and a representative from the Israeli Consulate in
Los Angeles. Additional talks are scheduled on Feb. 10, Feb. 17, Feb.
24 and March 10.
All presentations are free and open to the public. They are sponsored
by Cal Poly's College of Liberal Arts and History Department. For more
information, contact Foroohar at 756-2068 or mforooha@calpoly.edu.
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