As American and European universities expanded to include growing middle classes after World War II, a new kind of history emerged, a people's history, which shifted its focus from great men and glorious battles to the movements of unknown and, theretofore, unrecognized masses. This new history spawned many intellectual schools: working-class history in England, annals in France, alltag geschichte in Germany, peasant studies in North America, subaltern studies in South Asia, and several other versions of cultural studies. Unlike 19th- and early 20th-century ethnography and folklore that usually portrayed customs as static and dying, these new schools of research conceptualized and documented the history-shaping and category-making power of popular customs and, thereby, challenged hegemonic notions of agency.

Although scholarship on Israel–Palestine still seems dominated by attention to political elites or economic imperatives, Rebecca Stein and Ted Swedenburg have edited an excellent collection of essays championing the importance and role of popular culture in the complicated political struggles of Israel–Palestine. The collection contains two review essays, appropriate for beginners and specialists, charting the intellectual histories relevant to the book. The first is Stein and Swedenburg's introduction, which describes six stages of Palestine studies. The second is Ilan Pappe's mapping of Israel's reflexive, “Post-Zionist” wave among scholars and other cultural workers. Twelve more chapters, written by established authorities and brilliant younger scholars, provide outstanding case studies demonstrating how music, cinema, printed media, and cyberculture intersect with larger political struggles.

The topic receiving the greatest attention (five essays of fourteen), and the single richest area in the book, is music—something close to the heart of the senior editor, Swedenburg. The century-old memoirs of musician Wasif Jawhariyyeh allow Salim Tamari to describe late Ottoman Jerusalem as a place characterized by cosmopolitan syncretism and cultural hybridity rather than as a conservative town strictly defined by religious identities. Amy Horowitz describes the underground rise and commercial success of Mediterranean Israeli music as part of an ethnic (Mizrachi) revival in the 1970s and 1980s and the inspiring border crossing in the 1990s of the Arabic (Moroccan) Jewish–Israeli singer Zehava Ben, who recorded an homage to Umm Kulthum and performed for audiences in Egypt and under the Palestinian Authority. Another case that upsets hegemonic (and false) binaries is that of Arabic (Algerian) Jewish–French singer Enrico Macias, described by Ted Swedenburg. Macias also performed Arabic music and momentarily served as a cultural bridge between Israel and the Arab world. Not all musical efforts, however, serve to disrupt the Israeli–Palestinian antagonism. Palestine was sung about in songs produced in Nasser's revolutionary Egypt, then composed by Beirut's independent artists and eventually penned by Palestinian poets. Joseph Massad argues, in a particularly dazzling chapter, that these songs were generative, not merely expressive, of political sentiment and political commitment. Elliott Colla describes how Egyptian music videos exploit images of the Palestinian struggle and render Palestinians as sentimental-object victims of history whose redemption rests solely in individual acts of heroism. Thus, three essays on music describe it as a vehicle to transcend political antagonism and disrupt hegemonic categories, while two describe it as a vehicle to affirm core identities and promote national struggle.

Three essays examine textual forms of Israeli or Palestinian popular culture. Mark LeVine examines Palestinian newspapers from Mandate-period Jaffa that display an emerging nationalism within and against the growing international markets that support a bourgeois culture of consumption. Rebecca Stein examines how advertising and feature journalism in Israel about travel in the “new” Middle East of the 1990s reconstructed the perception of national boundaries at a time when globalization and peace treaties made border crossing easier. In a similar way, Laleh Khalili's examination of Internet surfing, a medium with the potential for instantly transcending borders, shows that it was more often used by youth in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon to reinforce their national identity and to connect with other Palestinians. These examples of popular texts describe them as boundary-making mechanisms in contexts where crossing borders is possible.

Two essays provide an unusual contrast of texts in English about Israel–Palestine. Melani McAlister examines the huge success of Left Behind books, which combine “Tom Clancy in their style, Stephen King in their sensibility, and Ian Fleming in their plot structure” (p. 292) to make evangelical Christianity modern and cool and simultaneously support the ideology that Zionism is a fulfillment of prophecy. At a different end of American pop culture, Joe Sacco's comic series Palestine is celebrated by Mary Layoun for its visual panel form, which, she says, is an outstanding mechanism for the juxtaposition of differing narratives and thus provides a complex rendering of Israel–Palestine that includes reflexive critical commentaries on the pornography of representing violence.

Examples from Israeli cinema and TV appear in Pappe's review of the post-Zionist wave in Israel, but two more chapters deal exclusively with cinema. Carol Bardenstein examines cross-casting: when Jews are cast as Arabs or vice versa in Israeli and Palestinian cinema. Livia Alexander asks if there is really anything that can be called Palestinian cinema and examines the themes of Palestinian filmmakers who make their movies for foreign audiences. The missing piece from this section is a discussion of Palestinian television, both in terms of the rapid spread of satellite technology and the creation of local Palestinian broadcasting.

All of the essays are well written and well informed. Unlike many collected volumes, these essays are held together by two consistent threads: the politics of popular culture and Israel–Palestine. Presented together, they display the complex terrain that is popular culture and the multiple forces shaping culture and politics. Some refer to the music of the masses, and others examine the avant-garde. Some focus on the mass distribution capacity of elite production in forms like centralized radio and others on popular participation in distribution, such as that made possible by cassette tapes (see Massad in particular, p. 177). Finally, the book also shows the interplay between those aspects of culture that are products of more orthodox “historical and political factors” like war or the actions of political elites, renderings of culture as epiphenomenal, and those aspects of political economy that are products of large-scale cultural, intellectual, or aesthetic choices. Understanding this dialectic is, of course, an important task for those interested in theory and research, as well as those interested in power.