J. C. Hurewitz

Who was J. C. Hurewitz?

Jacob Coleman Hurewitz was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on November 11, 1914 and died on May 16, 2008.

He was a professor emeritus in the political science department at Columbia University.

Hurewitz, who graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1936, then did his graduate work at Columbia, making what was then an unusual decision to concentrate on the Middle East. He worked for the Near East section of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, then worked successively at the State Department, as a political adviser on Palestine to the President’s cabinet and for the United Nations secretariat. Professor Hurewitz began studying Middle Eastern politics in 1950, before the field had emerged as an academic discipline. From 1970 until 1984, Professor Hurewtiz was director of the Columbia university's Middle East Institute, when he retired. In 1972, Hurewitz established the Columbia University Seminar on the Middle East, which he continued to chair until he was nearly 90.

His publications influenced many other historians. For example, William Roger Louis wrote in his book "The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–1951" that "my views on Arab nationalism and Zionism, and on the United States and the Middle East, have been influenced by the sensitive and dead-on-the-mark observations of J. C. Hurewitz."