Profile: Abdallah Schleifer (journalism)

Posted Nov 2, 2006      •Permalink      • Printer-Friendly Version Bookmark and Share

S. ABDALLAH SCHLEIFER,  is Professor Emeritus of journalism and mass communication at the American University in Cairo, where he founded and served as first director of what is now known as the Adham Center for Electronic Journalism. The former senior editor of Transnational Broadcasting Studies,  Schleifer continues to serve as publisher for TBS which is published jointly by the Adham Center and the Middle East Centre at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, where Schleifer has been appointed Visiting Scholar, effective January 1,2006.  Schleifer is the executi ve producer of the documentary Control Room . Prior to joining the AUC faculty, Schleifer served as NBC News Cairo Bureau Chief for nine years and NBC News Middle East producer/reporter based in Beirutfor five years.  He has covered the Middle East for American and Arab media for over 40 years, working as a special correspondent for The New York Times, Middle East correspondent for Jeune Afrique, and managing editor of Jordan’s English-language daily—The Jerusalem Star/Palestine News—prior to the 1967 War.  He is a senior fellow at the Aal al Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought (Amman, Jordan),  an Associate Scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a member of the board of trustees of both Fons Vitae Publishers and the Islamic Texts Society, and academic liaison officer for the Islamic Art Network of Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation.  He is a member of the Leadership Group on U.S.-Muslim Engagement.  He was a delegate to the Second Catholic-Muslim Forum of ‘A Common Word’, and a participant in the Common Word Conference:Loving God and Neighbor in Word and Deed, at Yale University.  He was a columnist for Islamica, and has published more than a hundred articles in academic journals, journals of opinion as well as the popular,press on mass media and political thought in the Muslim world, Islamic art and Sufism. His eyewitness account of the 1967 Arab Israeli War was published as The Fall of Jerusalem in the early seventies.He is the honorary chairman of the Foreign Press Association,Cairo. Before moving to the Middle East Schleifer was the first editor of Kulchur, a journal of literary and social criticism published in New York and a contributor of social and literary criticism as well as poetry to The Village Voice, The Nation, Dissent , Evergreen Review and Monthly Review and other publications

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