Jean Said Makdisi

Jean Said Makdisi (; born 1940) is a Palestinian writer and independent scholar, best known for her autobiographical writing.

Life Jean Said Makdisi was born in Jerusalem, British Mandate Palestine, to a notable academic Palestinian family. The younger sister of Rosemarie Said Zahlan and Edward Said, she was raised in Egypt and educated in the United States and England. She married a Lebanese academic of Palestinian origin, Samir Makdisi. They lived in America before moving to Beirut, Lebanon, in 1972,

They remained in Beirut throughout the Lebanese Civil War and the 1982 Lebanon War. Makdisi documented the city's decline in her first book, Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir (1989).

In Teta, Mother, and Me: An Arab Woman's Memoir (2005) Makdisi tells the story of three generations of Arab women: herself, her mother, Hilda Musa Said, and her grandmother, Munira Badr Musa.

She is the mother of Saree Makdisi, professor of English and comparative literature at University of California, Los Angeles; Ussama Makdisi, professor of history at the University of California Berkeley; and Karim Makdisi, professor of international politics at the American University of Beirut.

Works