The end of the year is upon us and two new books are out this month from Syracuse University Press.
In Heritage: Jewish Artists in America since 1900, author Matthew Baigell situates 19th century Jewish immigrant artists, and the generations that followed them, in a uniquely Jewish context. Starting from the shared values and references that informed generations of work, Baigell explores a century of progress through that specific lens. Placing these artists in a focused and continuous history of their own, Baigell shows how Jewish art in America has been informed by national and political trends, how first-generation Jewish artists responded to the works of their predecessors and images from a world away, and how contemporary artists reckon with modern Judaism. A pioneering effort to isolate a Jewish art stream all its own, Heritage challenges traditional assumptions about modern American art history and the connections between generations of Jewish artists.
The boundaries between the seven constituent emirates of the United Arab Emirates form one of the most complex territorial landscapes in the Middle East that is marked simultaneously by striking fragmentation on the map and inconspicuousness on the ground. In Drawing Boundaries Oil, Empire, and the Making of the Emirati State, author Niklas A. Haller traces how such boundaries were shaped, dismantled, disregarded, and reappeared throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He analyzes how the forces of oil and empire combined in progressively transforming the native system to the benefit of a select number of coastal rulers, ultimately bestowing upon them a maze of territorial possessions and a plethora of territorial disputes. When the seven Trucial Rulers came together in 1971 to form the UAE, the new federation only slowly succeeded in decreasing the visibility and importance of the inter-emirate boundaries as it asserted itself under Abu Dhabi’s aegis. Drawing Boundaries opens a previously unexplored lens on Emirati history that allows a more nuanced understanding of many of its key aspects: the impact and legacy of the imperial period, the formation of the UAE, and political trajectories during the federation’s early years.
Along with our new titles, there’s still plenty of time to explore 2025’s End of the Year Holiday Sale, with 40% off all of our titles with promotion code 05LEAF25.