In Failing the Crystal Ball Test, Ofira Seliktar, a political scientist at Gratz College, seeks to account for the “policy and intelligence debacle” (p. x) associated with the pre-eminent crisis of the Carter years. It is her hope that by understanding what went wrong with policy toward Iran, future policy-makers will be able to reduce the risk of similar disasters elsewhere in the relatively unstable conditions of the post-Cold War world. To achieve her objective, she focuses on the three-year period from the beginning of 1977 to the seizure of the United States embassy in November 1979. Seliktar, whose previous work has centered on Israel, bases her study on the multi-volume series of American documents seized at the embassy and published in Iran during the 1980s. These materials cluster around the last several years of U.S.–Iranian relations prior to the takeover of the compound. In addition, she has relied on an extensive list of secondary works in English.

Scholars often acknowledge reproductive behavior as a core issue in Israeli politics but they seldom examine how public policies affect family size. Israel has designed no official government fertility program, but the country's leaders are nevertheless obsessed with Jewish natality. Israeli women are bombarded with regulations affecting access to contraceptives and abortion procedures and with all sorts of unsubtle massages about the importance of mothering as a factor in the state's continuing vitality and fulfilling its national purpose. Jacqueline Portugese explains Israel's ongoing efforts to encourage a high Jewish birthrate by focusing a feminist lens on public discourse, popular culture, and particular policies, all of which, she argues, have a highly pernicious impact on women. Despite the differences in feminist perspectives on the issue of fertility, they share a critical stance toward state regulation of the family, and all aid Portugese's narrative in uncovering and explaining the large repertoire of relatively intrusive regulatory mechanisms at the disposal of the government. The special insight of Fertility in Israel lies in its clarifications of the connections between seemingly benign welfare benefits and tax incentives and denying women autonomy with regard to the decision to bear children.

The Soviet Union's collapse and the end of the Cold War have been accompanied by a declining interest in Marxian-inspired theories of political economy in the study of core–periphery relations. Concepts such as dependency and imperialism have been replaced by market forces and structural adjustment. Similarly, post-modernism's impact has been to erode interest in historical theories, especially those with a teleological bent. Thus, Robert Tignor's study, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire, is refreshing in raising issues that have not been central to the recent intellectual agenda in the study of non-Western societies.

The year 1929 was a particularly disruptive period for the city of Kabul (perhaps the only comparable time was when the mujahedin fought over it in the 1990s). In January of that year, under pressure from a band of Tajik rebels who entered Kabul almost unopposed, the ruler of Afghanistan, Amir Aman Allah, abdicated his throne and fled the capital. The man who occupied his office was a former soldier-turned-highwayman from the village of Kalakân some twenty miles north of Kabul. He was named Habib Allah (and is so called throughout the work under review), but he is better remembered by the epithet “Bacha-i Saqqaw,” or “Water Carrier's Son,” his father having once served in that role for the military. A Tajik, he was the first non-Pushtun to occupy the throne since the birth of Afghanistan in the 18th century. He would hold it for only nine months.

This book is a most welcome addition to the literature on Russian–Israeli relations. Although Yaacov Ro⊃i, in his study Soviet Decision Making in Practice: The USSR and Israel 1947–1954 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1980), covered the 1947–53 period thoroughly, and although there is an extensive body of literature on Russian policy toward Israel (and the rest of the Middle East) after the 1967 war, a gap has existed for many years in the scholarly coverage of Russian–Israeli relations from the death of Stalin in March 1953 until the June 1967 Six Day War. Yosef Govrin, a retired Israeli Foreign Office official who specialized in relations with the USSR, has gone a long way toward filling this gap. Having the advantage of access to the Israeli archives and internal political debates, Govrin presents a balanced picture of the Soviet–Israeli relationship, pointing out where, in his opinion, both Israel and the USSR made mistakes in developing their ties. He also goes into great detail on the question of Soviet Jewry (more than half of the book), noting how Israel's efforts to get the Soviet government to allow Jews to emigrate to Israel was a serious complicating factor in the relationship, although the primary cause for the USSR's breaking of diplomatic relations with Israel in June 1967 (Govrin was first secretary of the Israeli embassy in Moscow at the time) stemmed from Moscow's backing of the radical Ba⊃athist regime in Syria, which helped precipitate the 1967 war.

Compared to its neighboring countries, Afghanistan remains something of a blank on the historiographical map. Falling between Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Central Asian fields of expertise, it is in many respects the last great unclaimed territory of historical studies, not so much competed over as ignored by scholars trained in these areas. Despite a rich burst of scholarship in the 1960s, and the efforts of a small but distinguished cadre of scholars since then, Afghan history has neither truly developed as a historical field in its own right nor been successfully absorbed into the study of any of its adjacent regions. This is not to deny that Afghanistan has received some expert (and inexpert) attention since the U.S.-led intervention in late 2001: several important analytical works stand out among the shelves of other, more or less hastily written, books of the past decade. But anthropologists and political scientists have led the way; historians’ interventions in this burgeoning literature have been few. Of the three most significant books on Afghan history published since 2001, two deal with Afghanistan in relation to colonial India, and the other is a survey work written by an anthropologist (albeit benefiting from the analytical cross-fertilization).

After the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist narrative dominated the histories and historiographies of Middle Eastern and North African Jewries. Accordingly, Jews and Arabs were largely kept as distinct binaries divided by the intellectual walls that separated Middle East studies and Jewish studies programs. Local North African and Middle Eastern scholars also silenced or overlooked the Jewish dimension of Middle Eastern societies in the same manner that Israeli scholars ignored the historical connections between Arabs and Jews that existed both before and after 1948. The exclusive, sacred yet ebbing, nationalist paradigm has been plagued with historiographical fissures in recent decades, allowing a new wave of intellectual engagement by a young generation of Jewish and Muslim scholars who began to put the Jew and the Arab back into local and global histories formed through complex social, cultural, economic, and political networks.

In noting that Joseph Massad's identity as a Palestinian Jordanian should be central to any critical evaluation of Colonial Effects, I am taking seriously his claim that writing the book entailed, for him, a gradual “coming to terms” with this identity. I am also reapplying Massad's own interpretive method. “Throughout the book,” he tells us, “you will notice that I identify the geographic origins and the religious and ethnic backgrounds of people. This is done deliberately” (p. 16). Why? Because such specificity is needed to “interrogate” the claims people make about “Jordanian national identity and Jordanian national culture” (p. 16). I find it bizarre that Massad would cry “foul” when I conclude that his own (self-announced) “subject position” influenced his thinking on these topics.

I thank Professor Nikki R. Keddie for her constructive critique and am using this opportunity to clarify a few points. First, let me reiterate that I do not consider statist approaches to be “wrong,” but “one-sided,” and that I am not calling for their disposal but for “trying out new sources and perspectives then fusing them with state-centered perspectives into a broader panorama of Pahlavi Iran” (pp. 38–39). I see neither “sins” nor “an ongoing struggle between ‘statists’ and ‘antistatists.’” Such language would undercut a productive debate now and disregard the fact that in the long run—as some excesses of the cultural turn in the 1980s and many historians' subsequent search for new historiographic syntheses demonstrate—the pendulum always swings back.

Faced with the possible censoring of the film adaptation of ʿImarat Yaʿqubyan, the book's author, ʿAlaʾ al-Aswani, responded, “Why aren't Italy, France, or the United States defamed by movies dealing with homosexuality?” Implicit in his defensive question is a perceived distinction between First World gay rights and social conservatism in the Third World. My paper considers this conventional coupling of gay rights and civilizational discourse in the global reception of ʿImarat Yaʿqubyan. Against the author's remarks, I argue that the story is remarkable for staging an interplay between the putatively opposed characters of Hatim Rashid, an openly gay newspaper editor, and Taha al-Shazli, a young man lured into a terrorist group. By uniting these two characters along parallel tracks, ʿImarat Yaʿqubyan queerly couples the seemingly antagonistic forces endemic to the civilizational discourse of gay rights and offers us a means for imagining new constellations of queer politics.