Jaffa Shared and Shattered

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The book's analysis of the relations between the political, the cultural, and the neoliberal economy through a historical engagement with the city of Jaffa is a significant contribution to understanding the complexity of life for Jaffa's residents.

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~Journal of Levantine Studies

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Anybody with an interest in the politics and sociology of Israeli/Palestinian relations needs to read this book. Daniel Monterescu provides a rich and theoretically sophisticated account of urban politics in Jaffa.

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~Perspectives on Politics

"In showing how Jaffa is both shared and shattered, the book is an important and timely contribution to ongoing debates about mutual relations between Palestinians and Israelis in the context of recurring conflict, entrenched inequality and ongoing colonisation. It is essential reading for everyone interested in contemporary Palestinian–Israeli relations and should be of particular interest to political and urban anthropologists."

~Social Anthropology

"For anyone who would like to understand the experience of living as a member of the minority Arab population in a 'mixed' city in Israel, then Jaffa is both the place and the study to read. . . [T]his is a well-researched, very worthwhile excursus into a complicated societal problem. . . . Highly recommended."

~Choice

"Jaffa Shared and Shattered is a rich and provocative addition to the scholarly literature on Palestine/ Israel and urban studies."

~American Ethnologist

"A groundbreaking ethnography of hope and despair intertwined. This brilliant book is a rare accomplishment that could have been written only by a participant observer who is intimately familiar with Palestinian and Israeli societies alike. Monterescu's argument proves beyond any doubt that a relational sociology does more justice to the study of ethnically mixed cities and to urbanism at large than traditional methodological nationalism. A major and incisive contribution."

~Benoît Challand, author of Palestinian Civil Society:Foreign Donors and the Power to Promote and Exclude

"Jaffa is arguably the most lamented and exoticized city of pre-war Palestine. In this extensive investigation into 'the cultural logic of urban mix' in contemporary Jaffa, Daniel Monterescu succeeds in achieving two outstanding objectives: a sober assessment of its imagined past and a provocative vision of the city's 'binational' present and future. This book is essential reading for those who need to understand the processes of gentrification and ethnic conflict in this beleaguered city."

~Salim Tamari, author of Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighbourhoods and Their Fate in the War

"Jaffa is a phenomenal laboratory for recycling human diversity into human togetherness, and Monterescu's study is a phenomenal account of this in many ways unique experience: a thought-provoking, faithful portrayal of tensions, trials, and tribulations, but also the joys of conviviality and the unbridled creative potential of a multicultural and multiethnic city."

~Zygmunt Bauman, author of Modernity and Ambivalence

"Monterescu elaborates in nine eloquent chapters how retaining Jaffa's distinctive Arabness has been a century-long dialectical struggle at five key junctures for Palestinian residents. The present juncture, characterized by "creeping gentrification," perhaps poses the most incommensurable challenges yet. As Monterescu argues, the Israeli state's neo-liberal urban planning policy might appropriate the rhetoric of "binationality" and "mutual recognition," but in practice involves the collusion of "Jewish gentrifiers and Palestinian capitalist agents" that perpetuates a homogenizing, "relational system of reciprocal oppositions." This book sets a high bar for future analyses of the politics of "coexistence" in Israel/Palestine."

~Jennifer Robertson, author of Native and Newcomer:Making and Remaking a Japanese City

"Monterescu has carved out a domain all his own in the scholarship about minorities, ethnic conflict, and inter-ethnic relations. In this great book he once again helps us see dimensions easily overlooked in much scholarship."

~Saskia Sassen, author of Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy

"Based on intimate knowledge of Jaffa and its Jewish and Arab communities, and armed with both rich theoretical knowledge and human empathy, Daniel Monterescu goes back to the town of his childhood to tell us on Jews and Arabs who share this mixed town. He touches brilliantly the spaces in which the political and the personal melt into one and moments where the borders between members of national communities mist. This is not another book about "the Other" but rather a book on "Us"—members of two national communities who, during a conflict, willingly or against their will, share one space and create, tell, recreate and retell their own story and their own lives."

~Hillel Cohen, author of Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967