I did not know that J.C. Hurewitz was still alive until I read his obituary in the New York Times. I never met him, but I read him although he was mostly retired when I came to the US. What struck me most about this obituary is that it presented a man that I could not recognize from his writings. He was presented in the NYT as non-partisan and non-biased. Well, yes: if Ben Gurion was not biased on the Arab-Israeli conflict, than Hurewitz was not either. You may go back to his PhD dissertation published in 1950 as The Struggle for Palestine. Well, first: his conclusions are now largely discredited, from a historical point of view. Hurewitz went out of his way to refute claims of Zionist plans for the expulsion of Palestinians. And then go to his later book: Middle East Politics: the Middle East Dimension. I will leave aside the controversy about the book as reportedly raised by his graduate students at the time, but you will find that Hurewitz did not find one Israeli act of aggression or war that he did not justify, including the 1956 tripartite invasion of Egypt. He even used term "preemptive" strike to refer to Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956 (p. 363). You look back to that era of Middle East expertise and you realize: 1) language skills were more stressed in Middle East training then; 2) that all the Middle East departments at US universities were dominated by ardent (or quiet) Zionists at the time; 3) that pro-Palestinian voices were shut out of the academe with the exception of some conservative American oil advocates; 4) Middle East studies did not suffer from what it suffers now: namely, the invasion of non-specialists whose only qualifications on the Middle East is their fanatic support for gun Zionism, and their hostility to Islam. I now live at a time when Paul Berman is not hesitant to comment on Sayyid Qutb (or Qooooootb, as he pronounces it).