Dr. Meir Litvak

Dr. Meir Litvak is a Senior Research Fellow at the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv Univerisity, and a Professor in the University's Middle Eastern History Deparment. His research focuses on Arab anti-semitism and Arab perceptions of the Holocaust.

In 2003, Dr. Litvak taught the following courses at Emory as a visiting Israeli scholar at the Emory University History Department:

Modern Iran (Fall 2003)

This undergraduate lecture course reviewed the history of modern Iran from the crisis of the monarchy in the 19th Century through the modernizing royal dictatorship in the 20th Century to a revolutionary Islamic republic. The course examined the interplay between political, socioeconomic and cultural processes that shaped these developments, particularly the interaction between religion and politics, and that between foreign powers and domestic players. It also analyzed the causes of the Islamic revolution, and Iran's quest to reconcile between modernity and tradition by formulating new Islamic policies in the domestic and foreign arenas in the twenty-year period after the revolution.

Radical Islamic Movements in the Modern Middle East (Fall 2003)

This junior/senior colloquium reviewed the emergence and evolution of radical Islamic movements in the modern Middle East since the traumatic encounter with the West during the 19th Century to the present. It covered movements from the Taliban in Afghanistan and Ben Laden's al-Qaida, going through the Iranian revolution, the Muslim Brethren in Egypt, Hamas in Palestine, Hizbollah in Lebanon to Algeria in North Africa. The seminar examined the interaction between modern Islamic ideologies and the political conduct of these movements in such issues as the desired type of Islamic government, the compatibility between Islam and democracy, the meaning of jihad in the modern period, women's rights and socioeconomic policies.