Recollections of the Nakba through a Teenager's Eyes

Muhammad Hallaj, a political scientist specializing in Palestinian affairs and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was born in Qalqilya, Palestine, in 1932. After earning his doctorate from the University of Florida in 1966, he taught at Florida's Jacksonville University and then at the University of Jordan in Amman. Hallaj returned to the West Bank in 1975, where he served as dean of social sciences and later as academic vice president of Birzeit University before becoming the first director of the Council for Higher Education in the West Bank and Gaza. While taking a leave to go to Harvard University as a visiting scholar in 1983, Hallaj was denied a visa to return to the West Bank. Among the positions he has held since then have been editor of Palestine Perspectives (1983––1991), member (and subsequent head) of the Palestinian delegation on Refugees to themultilateral peace talks following the Madrid conference (1991––1993), and executive director of the Palestine Center and the Jerusalem Fund. At the request of JPS, Dr. Hallaj shared his memories of the 1948 war and its aftermath, which he experienced as a high school student in Jaffa, and then in Qalqilya and Tulkarm.

France V. Scholes: Historian of New Spain

WHEN France Vinton Scholes received the Serra Award of the Academy of American Franciscan History in 1956, one of his distinguished colleagues remarked to me that “Scholes is a historian's historian.” Those of us who had the privilege to work with him, students and colleagues, also knew him as a master teacher and an ideal university administrator. In 1969 when the University of New Mexico administration building was named for its former Academic Vice President and Graduate Dean, we told him that it had always been “Scholes Hall ” for us.