Syria is where food, memory, and resilience collide: recreate the flavors of this beautiful country in Our Syria, for delicious meals anywhere in the world. Syria has always been the meeting point for the most delicious flavors from East and West, where spices and sweetness collide. Even now, in possibly the country's darkest hour, Syrian families in tiny apartments from Beirut to Berlin are searching out the best tomatoes, lemons, pomegranates, and parsley to evoke the memory of home, keeping their treasured food history alive across continents. Friends and passionate cooks Itab and Dina met Syrian women in the Middle East and Europe to collect together the very best recipes from one of the world's greatest food cultures. They spent months cooking with them, learning their recipes and listening to stories of home. Recipes like the following elicit vibrant images of an ancient culture: Hot Yogurt Soup Fresh Thyme and Halloumi Salad Lamb and Okra Stew Chicken Shawarma Wraps Semolina and Coconut Cake Our Syria is a delicious celebration of the unique taste, culture, and food of Syria-and a celebration of everything that food and memory can mean to an individual, to a family, and to a nation.

The world has failed Syria’s refugees and some of the world’s wealthiest countries have turned their backs on this humanitarian disaster. Syria’s neighbours—Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq—have together absorbed more than 3.8 million refugees. The need for food relief is great and growing. Acclaimed chefs and cookbook authors from all corners of the world have come together to help food relief efforts to alleviate the suffering of Syrian refugees. Each has contributed a recipe to this beautifully illustrated cookbook of delicious soups. Contributors include: Joe Barza, Mark Bittman, Anthony Bourdain, Sally Butcher, Alexis Couquelet, Aglaia Kremenzi, Carolyn Kumpe, Greg Malouf, Yotam Ottolenghi, Claudia Roden, Ana Sortun, Sami Tamimi, Alice Waters, Paula Wolfert, and many others. Profits from the sale of this cookbook will be donated to help fund food relief efforts to Syrian refugees.

Demystifying Syria offers an extraordinary insight into the shifting relations between the Ba'th party and the armed forces, civil law, social structure, burgeoning private enterprise, internal political opposition, the European Union and its relation to Syria. This book goes beyond the headlines to offer a detailed portrait of the political, economic, social and diplomatic dynami that shape this pivotal and fiercely independent Middle Eastern state. Contributors include Bassem Haddad, Souhail Belhadj, Baudoin Dupret, Zouhair Ghazzal, Thomas Pierret, Salwa Ismail, Joshua Landis and Joe Pace. 'Demonstrates how US intervention in the region weakened the position of the Syrian opposition ... shows Syrian studies in the best possible light, edited to a high level and recommended to everyone interested in the complexities - rather than the mysteries - of contemporary Syria.' Times Higher Education Supplement 'This compelling book offers the reader much food for thought on a country that certainly defies any attempt to be encapsulated in unidirectional and straightforward definitions.' International Spectator

Brought to this country at the turn of the century by the authors' grandparents, immigrants from Aleppo, Syria, this collection features treasured family recipes that are still prepared in Syria today. Complete with English and Arabic indices of the 114 recipes, this book opens with an introduction to Syrian and Aleppian cuisine, a glossary of terms, and a guide to preparation.

Alia Malek weaves a lyrical narrative around the history of her family's apartment building in the heart of Damascus, the many lives that crossed in the stairwell, and how the fates of her neighbors reflect the fate of her country. Reading Group Guide Included At the Arab Spring's hopeful start, Alia Malek returned to Damascus to reclaim her grandmother's apartment, which had been lost to her family since Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970. Its loss was central to her parent's decision to make their lives in America. In chronicling the people who lived in the Tahaan building, past and present, Alia portrays the Syrians--the Muslims, Christians, Jews, Armenians, and Kurds--who worked, loved, and suffered in close quarters, mirroring the political shifts in their country. Restoring her family's home as the country comes apart, she learns how to speak the coded language of oppression that exists in a dictatorship, while privately confronting her own fears about Syria's future. The Home That Was Our Country is a deeply researched, personal journey that shines a delicate but piercing light on Syrian history, society, and politics. Teeming with insights, the narrative weaves acute political analysis with a century of intimate family history, delivering an unforgettable portrait of the Syria that is being erased.

From 1970 until his death in 2000, Hafiz Asad ruled Syria with an iron fist. His regime controlled every aspect of daily life. Seeking to preempt popular unrest, Asad sometimes facilitated the expression of anti-government sentiment by appropriating the work of artists and writers, turning works of protest into official agitprop. Syrian dissidents were forced to negotiate between the desire to genuinely criticize the authoritarian regime, the risk to their own safety and security that such criticism would invite, and the fear that their work would be co-opted as government propaganda, as what miriam cooke calls “commissioned criticism.” In this intimate account of dissidence in Asad’s Syria, cooke describes how intellectuals attempted to navigate between charges of complicity with the state and treason against it. A renowned scholar of Arab cultures, cooke spent six months in Syria during the mid-1990s familiarizing herself with the country’s literary scene, particularly its women writers. While she was in Damascus, dissidents told her that to really understand life under Hafiz Asad, she had to speak with playwrights, filmmakers, and, above all, the authors of “prison literature.” She shares what she learned in Dissident Syria. She describes touring a sculptor’s studio, looking at the artist’s subversive work as well as at pieces commissioned by the government. She relates a playwright’s view that theater is unique in its ability to stage protest through innuendo and gesture. Turning to film, she shares filmmakers’ experiences of making movies that are praised abroad but rarely if ever screened at home. Filled with the voices of writers and artists, Dissident Syria reveals a community of conscience within Syria to those beyond its borders.