Мартин Крэмер: Американский израильский востоковед и критик ближневосточных исследований

American Israeli scholar

Martin Seth Kramer (; born September 9, 1954, Washington, D. C.) is an American Israeli scholar of the Middle East at Tel Aviv University and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His focus is on the history and politics of the Middle East, contemporary Islam, and modern Israel.

Kramer began his undergraduate degree under Itamar Rabinovich in Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University and completed his BA in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. He earned his PhD at Princeton as well, under Fouad Ajami, L. Carl Brown, Charles Issawi, and Bernard Lewis, who directed his thesis. He also received a History MA from Columbia University. He gained a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 1982.

Kramer is a senior and past editor of the Middle East Forum's Middle East Quarterly. Primarily a scholar of twentieth century Islamist intellectual and political history, Kramer has also published columns in the National Review magazine and on the websites of the History News Network.

Kramer was an early advocate of attacking Saddam Hussein in the wake of 9/11, arguing in December 2001 that regardless of a possible involvement, he posed a threat to the entire Middle East. However, he was critical of the shifting rationale for the war in October 2002, questioning the United States' "tools of social engineering" needed to promote an eventual democracy process in the Arab world. He was a senior policy adviser on the Middle East to the Rudy Giuliani Presidential Campaign in 2007.

In 2001, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy published Kramer's book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. In the book (as reported by the New York Times), Kramer argued that Middle East experts "failed to ask the right questions at the right time about Islam. They underestimated its impact in the 1980s; they misrepresented its role in the early 1990s; and they glossed over its growing potential for terrorism against America in the late 1990s. "The book was given positive mentions in The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Washington Post

John L. Esposito accused Kramer of trying to discredit the entire Middle East establishment. Zachary Lockman, professor of modern Middle East history at New York University, admits that Kramer's criticism of Middle East scholars' general failure to anticipate the rise of Islamist movements in the 1970s is well deserved but maintains that "[o]verall, Kramer’s approach is deeply flawed as a history of Middle East studies as a scholarly field."

Kramer was one of the most vocal supporters of HR 3077, a bill in the United States House of Representatives designed to reform area studies in the US. Saree Makdisi argues in a Los Angeles Times op ed that the bill "poses a profound threat to academic freedom".

"The American Interest", Azure magazine, Autumn 2006. "Nation and Assassination in the Middle East", Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2004. "Coming to Terms: Fundamentalists or Islamists? ", Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2003. "Policy and the Academy: An Illicit Relationship? ", Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2003.

What Do the Financial Crisis and US Middle East Policy Have in Common? December 2008. Israel's Gaza Strategy January 2009. Sanctioning "Resistance" January 2009.

The MLK Day Bundle 17 January 2021. Martin Luther King Jr. and Israel, then and now January 2020, Times of Israel
In the Words of Martin Luther King Jr. chapter in The War on Error: Israel, Islam, and the Middle East (New Brunswick, NJ:Transaction, 2016), 253 67. Where MLK really stood on Israel and the Palestinians 2019. Mosaic Magazine