The Importance of Being Jewish in an Arab Studies Department

I speak with Joseph Sassoon, Professor and Director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies of Georgetown University. Joseph is also the author of the recent book The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire. A NYTimes review of the book can be found here. We discuss the fascinating Sassoon family, a conversation that takes us from 19th century Baghdad to Mumbai and then to Shanghai and England. The fortunes of the Sassoon family were tied up in so many of the great events of the period from the Opium Wars in China to the Civil War in the United States.