A New Horizon in an Old City: Amin Shunnar, al-Ufuq al-Jadid Magazine, and the Intellectual History of 1960s Jerusalem
Keyword: 
Jerusalem
nakba
iltizam (commitment)
Amin Shunnar
al-Ufuq al-Jadid (New Horizon)
intellectual history
print culture
Jordan
Palestine
Abstract: 

This article offers a window into the intellectual history of Jordanian-ruled Jerusalem during the 1960s by means of a deep study of al-Ufuq al-Jadid (New Horizon) – a Jerusalemite cultural and literary serial, which ran from 1961 to 1966 under the editorship of Palestinian poet Amin Shunnar (1933–2005). The bulk of al-Ufuq al-Jadid’s content took Palestine as a core concern and saw in it a creative intellectual impetus. This article parses the contents of al-Ufuq al-Jadid and the writings of its editor on the 1948 Nakba to evoke a picture of cultural life in Jerusalem on the eve of Israeli occupation.

Author biography: 

Adey Almohsen is an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow and a visiting assistant professor in history at Grinnell College, Iowa. He is currently working on a monograph set to explore Palestinian intellectual history (and its Arab discontents) from the 1940s to the 1960s across Amman, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Jerusalem, Khartoum, Kuwait, and beyond. The author thanks Amin Shunnar’s son, Tariq, for awarding the translation rights that made much of this article possible.