Occupation Middle East scholar | Name J. Hurewitz | |
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Employer U.S. Government, Department of State, Washington, DC, senior political analyst, 1945–46United Nations Secretariat, Lake Success, NY, political affairs officer, 1949–50Columbia University, New York, NYlecturer, 1950–52assistant professor, 1952–54associate professor, 1954–58professor of government, beginning 1958director, Columbia's Middle East Institute, beginning 1971Consultant toRAND Corp., 1962–70Department of State, 1966–70United States Department of Defense, 1970–74Stanford Research Institute, 1971–75American Broadcast Co. News, 1978–79 Notable work "Diplomacy in the Near and Middle East" (Nostrand)"The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics" (Yale)"The Struggle for Palestine" (Norton, 1950) Spouse(s) Miriam Freund (m.1946–2008) Died May 16, 2008, Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada Books The struggle for Palestine, Diplomacy in the Near and Middl, Unity and disunity in the Middl, Middle East Politics: T, Middle East dilemmas | ||
Years active 1937–1984 and beyond | ||
Jacob Coleman Hurewitz (November 11, 1914 – May 16, 2008) was a professor emeritus in the political science department at Columbia University.
Hurewitz graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut in 1936, then did his graduate work at Columbia, making what was then an unusual decision to concentrate on the Middle East. He worked for the Near East section of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, then worked successively at the State Department, as a political adviser on Palestine to the President’s cabinet and for the United Nations secretariat. Professor Hurewitz began studying Middle Eastern politics in 1950, before the field had emerged as an academic discipline. From 1970 until 1984, Professor Hurewitz was director of the Columbia university's Middle East Institute, when he retired. In 1972, Hurewitz established the Columbia University Seminar on the Middle East, which he continued to chair until he was nearly 90.
His publications influenced many other historians. For example, William Roger Louis wrote in his book "The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–1951" (Clarendon, 1984) that "my views on Arab nationalism and Zionism, and on the United States and the Middle East, have been influenced by the sensitive and dead-on-the-mark observations of J. C. Hurewitz."
Professor Emeritus J.C. Hurewitz, 93, died on May 16, 2008, of pneumonia.
The Hoover Institution Archives hold fourteen boxes of his papers.