Salim Yaqub, Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.-Middle East Relations in the 1970s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. In Salim Yaqub’s prodigiously researched, engagingly written, and highly original book, Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.-Middle East Relations in the 1970s, the complex interactions between the United States and Arabs, from Middle East high diplomacy to U.S. university campuses, popular culture to political activism, were beset by contradictions. Whether in oil crises, international terrorism, or U.S. support for Israel, global events propelled Americans and Arabs into one another in frequently antagonistic situations. But it was also a time when, partly through the enthusiastic public diplomacy of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, Americans viewed individual Arabs more favorably than ever before. Moreover, Arab Americans worked tirelessly to bring themselves into the center of American society in important ways. According to Yaqub, the pattern stuck. “In subsequent decades, as in the 1970s, America’s troubled relations with the Middle East made life difficult for Arab Americans, sometimes exceedingly so, but they resisted in ways that gained them strength and visibility,” he argues (345).