Review by Choice Review
The growth of media technologies in the Arab world has generated scholarship concerned with how developments in the media sector impact political, social, and cultural patterns in the region. Jamal's contribution to this scholarship is excellent because he uses changes in the media sector to illuminate key questions about state-minority relations and media consumption in the Arab world. In focusing on the communicative and media-consumption behavior of Palestinian citizens of Israel, Jamal (political science, Tel Aviv Univ.) demonstrates how minorities negotiate power relations and confront political exclusion. Arab media in Israel has always been subject to state censorship. However, with the advent of new technologies and the liberalization of Israeli press laws in the 1990s, which led to growth in both the Hebrew and Arabic presses, the Palestinian citizens of Israel have displayed media-consumption patterns that traverse both their Israeli reality and their wider Arab cultural world. Thus, this minority community has developed a "double consciousness," reflecting connections to both the Arab and Israeli public spheres. Jamal's book provides an excellent and engaging account of how this community negotiates these two spheres and how it exercises agency through its communicative behavior. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. S. N. Abboud Susquehanna University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
