January 24, 2002

• Special Report: Turnaround - The neighborhood is looking good
  Six years after Penn refocused its attention on its home neighborhood, the Current takes a look at Penn's investments and how the neighborhood has changed.
• Universities take on the role of redevelopers
• Little scholars from near and far
• Business success means streets are jumping
• Penn's "greene countrie towne"
• It took a community and the University to raise a neighborhood
• Get to know the neighbors

• Protein fights nerve loss
• Science, media and ethics contend
• New one-on-one coaching

• Research: Do ads get teens to just say no?
• Staff Q&A: By night, Ron Washington cleans the halls of Leidy Labs. But let us tell you about his day job.

• Ask Benny: A new column answers your Penn questions
• Of mice, men and embryonic stem cells
• Human nature takes a walk
• Defend yourself
• Courses for a better you

• Event Listings
• Editor's Pick: A documentary revolution
• The dream lives on
• Kids' festival: In the market for fun
• People's Choice: Resolutions come and go; food serves keep serving

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• Bookquick from the University Press
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• At Leisure with... Book Talk
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BOOKQUICK/New from the University Press

“Crossing the Green Line: Border Struggles in the Palestinian-Israeli West Bank”

Avram Bornstein
192 pages, 12 black-and-white illustrations, $36.50 cloth

The Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority have negotiated borders, and now both sides have built permanent military checkpoints. “Crossing the Green Line” is about passing through these checkpoints—specifically those that mark the Green Line, the geopolitical border separating the West Bank from Israel proper—and how their existence affects the daily life of West Bank Palestinians.

In the best tradition of ethnographic inquiry and participant-observation, Avram Bornstein, an anthropologist at the John Jay College of the City University of New York, explores the complex relationship between Israeli Arabs and West Bank Palestinians in this latest volume from the Press’s anthropology series, Ethnography of Political Violence.

At the heart of the situation lies the question of territorial partition and the establishment of sovereignty within borders created by the partition.

By describing the everyday lives of West Bank Palestinians with whom he lived and worked, Bornstein reveals that Palestinian agriculture and industry have become so severely restricted by Israeli border policies that tens of thousands of Palestinians must work for Israelis, crossing the border illegally to work in Israel every day

Those Palestinians forced to live in the West Bank feel the divide profoundly, as their socioeconomic situations dramatically differ from relatives living only a few miles on the other side of the border

Bornstein’s main focus is upon the Green Line as a facilitator of Israeli economic and political domination, but he also treats borders as artifacts of globalization, choke-point conduits that serve to control the flow of international capital and labor, and as mechanisms that shape modern, legal and cultural identities.

— University of Pennsylvania Press