Commemorating Bernard Lewis’s 100th Birthday

Bernard Lewis

Today (May 31) is Bernard Lewis’s 100th birthday. Called “the most influential postward historian of Islam and the Middle East” by his former student Martin Kramer, Middle East Forum president Daniel Pipes writes that that reading Lewis’s book The Arabs in History in 1969, “launched my career. Over the next 47 years, Lewis continued to exert a profound influence on my studies.” Pipes’s op-ed on Lewis, “Bernard Lewis and Me,” appears today at Israel Hayom (see this version for extra links), and is also part of an NRO Symposium titled “Bernard Lewis at 100: An Appreciation.” The latter contains entries by Victor Davis Hanson, Jay Nordlinger, and David Price-Jones, among others.

Others who have written in his honor for this special day include Harold Rhode, who co-authored an op-ed in il Giornale, and Reuel Marc Gerecht, who wrote an essay for the Weekly Standard. Additional essays will appear in the coming weeks.

Winfield Myers is managing editor of the Middle East Forum and director of its Campus Watch project, which reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North American universities. He has taught world history and other topics at the University of Michigan, the University of Georgia, Tulane, and Xavier University of Louisiana. He was previously managing editor of The American Enterprise magazine and CEO of Democracy Project, Inc., which he co-founded. Mr. Myers has served as senior editor and communications director at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and is principal author and editor of a college guide, Choosing the Right College (1998, 2001). He was educated at the University of Georgia, Tulane, and the University of Michigan.
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