Sara Roy

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Sara Roy is a Research Associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. She lived in the Gaza Strip for several years in the 1980s.[1] Her research and over 100 publications on Palestinian politics and economics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict focus on the economy of the Gaza and more recently on the Palestinian Islamic movement.[2] Reviewing her 2007 Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, Bruce Lawrence writes that "Roy is the leading researcher and most widely respected academic authority on Gaza today."[3] She serves on the Advisory Boards of American Near East Refugee Aid and the Center for American and Jewish Studies at Baylor University.[2]

Roy has drawn criticism as well. Phyllis Chesler called her one of "the most savage critics—of America and Israel."[4]

In a Holocaust Remembrance lecture at Baylor that has been reprinted several times, Roy said that "the Holocaust has been the defining feature of my life."[5] Both her parents survived the Holocaust, which killed over 100 members of her extended family from the Jewish shtetls of Poland. Her father, Abraham, was one of the two known survivors of the Chelmno extermination camp, while her mother, Taube, survived Halbstadt (Gross Rosen) and Auschwitz. Having visited Israel many times when she was growing up, she writes "It was perhaps inevitable that I would follow a path that would lead me to the Arab-Israeli issue."[6]

[edit] Public attention

Roy drew public attention[citation needed] when a book review she had written of Mathew Levitt's book Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad was rejected by Tufts University’s Fletcher Forum on World Affairs. After the editor-in-chief accepted the piece, he wrote Roy that the article had been reviewed for "objectivity," and that "all reviewers found the piece one-sided" and then rejected it, but apologized "for the way in which this process was carried out."[7] Middle East Policy later published the review with Roy's note on the affair which described the rejection as a "blatant... case of censorship."[7]

[edit] Publications

  • The Gaza Strip Survey (1986)
  • The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development (1995, 2001)
  • The Economics of Middle East Peace: A Reassessment (1999, editor)
  • Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (London: Pluto Press, 2007)
  • Between Extremism and Civism: Political Islam in Palestine (Princeton University Press, forthcoming)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Sara Roy, From Oslo to the Road Map. Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine (March 2004). Retrieved on 2008-02-18.
  2. ^ a b Sara Roy. Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Retrieved on 2008-02-18.
  3. ^ Lawrence, Bruce B. (Fall, 2007). "Roy: Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (review)". Journal of Palestine Studies XXXVII (145). Institute for Palestine Studies. doi:10.1525/jps.2007.37.1.111. 
  4. ^ Chesler, Phyllis (March 2, 2008). Traumatic Brain Injury and the Permanent Intifada. israelenews.com. Retrieved on 2008-04-11.
  5. ^ Adam Shatz (2004). Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing About Zionism and Israel. Nation Books. ISBN 1-56025-509-9. 
  6. ^ Roy, Sara (Fall 2002). "Living with the Holocaust: The Journey of a Child of Holocaust Survivors". Journal of Palestine Studies (125). Institute for Palestine Studies. 
  7. ^ a b Roy, Sara (June 2007). "Review of Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad by Matthew Levitt". Middle East Policy 14 (2): 162–166.