J. C. Hurewitz

Jacob Coleman Hurewitz (November 11, 1914 – May 16, 2008) was an American political scientist.

Hurewitz graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut in 1936, then did his graduate work at Columbia, making what was then an unusual decision to concentrate on the Middle East. He worked for the Near East section of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, then worked successively at the State Department, as a political adviser on Palestine to the President’s cabinet and for the United Nations secretariat. Professor Hurewitz began studying Middle Eastern politics in 1950, before the field had emerged as an academic discipline. From 1970 until 1984, Professor Hurewitz was director of Columbia University's Middle East Institute, after which he retired. In 1972, Hurewitz established the Columbia University Seminar on the Middle East, which he continued to chair until he was nearly 90.

His publications influenced many other historians. For example, Wm. Roger Louis wrote in his book The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–1951 (Clarendon, 1984) that "my views on Arab nationalism and Zionism, and on the United States and the Middle East, have been influenced by the sensitive and dead-on-the-mark observations of J. C. Hurewitz."

Hurewitz, died on May 16, 2008, of pneumonia, aged 93.

The Hoover Institution Archives hold fourteen boxes of his papers.

Books The Struggle for Palestine, ACLS Humanities E-Book (2008), Oil, the Arab-Israel Dispute, and the Industrial World, Columbia University, Westview Press, Persian Gulf: After Iran's Revolution, Foreign Policy Assn, Diplomacy in the Near and Middle East, A Documentary Record: Volume 1, 1535 - 1914; Volume 2 1914 - 1956, D. Van Nostrand Company Inc. (1956), ASIN B000TLT4ES The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics: A Documentary Record, Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged; Volume 2, British-French Supremacy, 1914–1945, Yale University Press (1979), Middle East Politics: The Military Dimension, Frederick A. Praeger (1969); Westview Press (1982), Middle East Dilemmas, Harper & Brothers (1953), The Road to Partition: The Palestine problem, 1936–1948, Norton (1950), ASIN B0006ASFPQ