It was destroyed nearly 2,000 years ago, and yet the Temple of Jerusalem--cultural memory, symbol, and site--remains one of the most powerful, and most contested, buildings in the world. This glorious structure, imagined and re-imagined, reconsidered and reinterpreted again and again over two millennia, emerges in all its historical, cultural, and religious significance in Simon Goldhill's account.

Built by Herod on a scale that is still staggering--on an earth and rock platform 144,000 square meters in area and 32 meters high--and destroyed by the Roman emperor Titus 90 years later, in 70 AD, the Temple has become the world's most potent symbol of the human search for a lost ideal, an image of greatness. Goldhill travels across cultural and temporal boundaries to convey the full extent of the Temple's impact on religious, artistic, and scholarly imaginations. Through biblical stories and ancient texts, rabbinical writings, archaeological records, and modern accounts, he traces the Temple's shifting significance for Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

A complex and engaging history of a singular locus of the imagination--a site of longing for the Jews; a central metaphor of Christian thought; an icon for Muslims: the Dome of the Rock--The Temple of Jerusalem also offers unique insight into where Judaism, Christianity, and Islam differ in interpreting their shared inheritance. It is a story that, from the Crusades onward, has helped form the modern political world.

In Being Urban, Simon Goldhill and his team of outstanding urbanists explore the meaning of the urban condition, with particular reference to the Middle East. As Goldhill explains in his introduction, 'What is a good city?', five questions motivate the book:

How can a city be systematically planned and yet maintain a possibility of flexibility, change, and the wellbeing of citizens?

How does the city represent itself to itself, and image its past, its present and its future?

What is it to dwell in, and experience, a city?

How does violence erupt in and to a city, and what strategies of reconciliation and reconstruction can be employed?

And finally, what is the relationship between the infrastructure of the city and the political process?

Following the introduction, the twelve chapters are grouped into four sections: Engagement and Space; Infrastructure and Space; Conflict and Structures; and Curating the City. Through each chapter, the contributors reflect on aspects of urban infrastructure and culture, citizenship, belonging and exclusion, politics and conflict, with examples from across the Middle East, from Cairo to Tehran, Tel Aviv to Istanbul.

Not only will Being Urban further understanding of the topography of citizenship in the Middle East and beyond, it will also contribute to answering one of today's key questions: What Is A Good City?

Jerusalem is the site of some of the most famous religious monuments in the world, from the Dome of the Rock to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Western Wall of the Temple. Since the nineteenth century, the city has been a premier tourist destination, not least because of the countless religious pilgrims from the three Abrahamic faiths.

But Jerusalem is more than a tourist site--it is a city where every square mile is layered with historical significance, religious intensity, and extraordinary stories. It is a city rebuilt by each ruling Empire in its own way: the Jews, the Romans, the Christians, the Muslims, and for the past sixty years, the modern Israelis. What makes Jerusalem so unique is the heady mix, in one place, of centuries of passion and scandal, kingdom-threatening wars and petty squabbles, architectural magnificence and bizarre relics, spiritual longing and political cruelty. It is a history marked by three great forces: religion, war, and monumentality.

In this book, Simon Goldhill takes on this peculiar archaeology of human imagination, hope, and disaster to provide a tour through the history of this most image-filled and ideology-laden city--from the bedrock of the Old City to the towering roofs of the Holy Sepulchre. Along the way, we discover through layers of buried and exposed memories--the long history, the forgotten stories, and the lesser-known aspects of contemporary politics that continue to make Jerusalem one of the most embattled cities in the world.

In recent years, there has been no issue that has convulsed academia and its role in society more stridently than the personal politics of its institutions: who has access to education? How does who you are change what you study and how you engage with it? How does scholarship reflect the politics of society - how should it? These new essays from one of the best-known scholars of ancient Greece offer a refreshing and provocative contribution to these discussions.

What is a Jewish Classicist? analyses how the personal voice of a scholar plays a role in scholarship, how religion and cultural identity are acted out within an academic discipline, and how translation, the heart of any engagement with the literature of antiquity, is a transformational practice. Topical, engaging, revelatory, this book opens a sharp and personal perspective on how and why the study of antiquity has become such a battlefield in contemporary culture.

The first essay looks at how academics can and should talk about themselves, and how such positionality affects a scholar's work - can anyone can tell his or her own story with enough self-consciousness, sophistication and care? The second essay, which gives the book its title, takes a more socio-anthropological approach to the discipline, and asks how its patterns of inclusion and exclusion, its strategies of identification and recognition, have contributed to the shape of the discipline of classics. This initial enquiry opens into a fascinating history of change - how Jews were excluded from the discipline for many years but gradually after the Second World war became more easily assimilated into it. This in turn raises difficult questions for the current focus on race and colour as the defining aspects of personal identification, and about how academia reflects or contributes to the broader politics of society. The third essay takes a different historical approach and looks at the infrastructure or technology of the discipline through one of its integral and time-honoured practices, namely, translation. It discusses how translation, far from being a mere technique, is a transformational activity that helps make each classicist what they are. Indeed, each generation needs its own translations as each era redefines its relation to antiquity.