Hamlet as an Arab Intellectual: A Marxist Reading of Mamduh Adwan’s Play Hamlet Wakes Up Late

The paper aims at reading Mamduh Adwan’s play Hamlet Wakes up Late (1978) from a Marxist perspective to broadly examine how life under a Capitalist system along with its foreign investments and trading services can easily destroy the political, social as well as the cultural surroundings of a certain nation. Throughout his play, Adwan brilliantly adapts Shakespeare and offers a Marxist point of view to comment on how the West continues to dominate the East with its economic power. Importantly, in employing Shakespeare’s portrayal of Hamlet as a tragic hero, Adwan uses him as a dramatic archetype to comment on one of the Shakespearean’s famous political quotes “something is rotten in the state of Denmark”. Seen from this perspective, the paper will read Adwan’s play from a Marxist viewpoint to demonstrate how he has in fact used Hamlet’s lack of intellectualism to criticize the Syrian policy of “The Six Day War” defeat to Israel.

US Vicarious Identity with Israel, 1967–2020

The chapter explores the United States’ vicarious identification with Israel, arguing that since the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel has served as a positive identity proxy. Two features of Israeli military might have proven attractive for the United States’ vicarious identification with it: its preemptive military actions and its resounding military successes. Using generational analysis the chapter surmises that the increased connections made to Israel in the 1990s and 2000s by the United States are a result of the US Baby Boomer generation’s admiration of Israel as heroic, right, and assertive and where this image served as a formative experience for that generation at the same time as the United States was at its military, moral, and cultural nadir in Vietnam amid the broader tumult of the 1960s and 1970s. This generational take may also explain the increased tensions between the two countries and even the unraveling of the United States’ vicarious identification with Israel hereafter.