Jack G. Shaheen Papers

Dr. Jack G. Shaheen (1935-2017) dedicated his career to identifying and contesting damaging stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims in US popular media. Shaheen authored several books including The TV Arab (1984), Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs after 9/11 (2008), and the award-winning Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (2001, 2009), which the Media Education Foundation produced as a documentary in 2006. He served as an Oxford Research Scholar and as a consultant for the Los Angeles Commission on Human Relations, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and New York City’s Commission on Civil Rights. Shaheen was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU and the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at NYU.

A professor, author, and professional film consultant, Shaheen and his wife Bernice collected and analyzed materials that depicted Arabs and Muslims as the “cultural other.” The Jack G. Shaheen Papers contain nearly 3,000 motion pictures (spanning from late nineteenth-century silent films to contemporary Hollywood productions) and television programs (including comedies, dramas, cartoons, and commercials) on DVD and VHS tapes, a selection of which have been digitized. Paper ephemera in the archive comprises editorial cartoons, motion picture posters and stills, comic books, and advertisements. Also included in the collection are film and television scripts, books, magazines, toys, and games. His extensive collection provides valuable documentation of the representations of Arabs and Muslims in US popular culture and mass media from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

The Jack G. Shaheen Papers are housed in multiple repositories at New York University. To access the contents of the collection, visit apa.nyu.edu/collections/ to download the collection guide and contact the appropriate repository.

The Jack G. Shaheen Collection on Arabs in US Film and Television is housed in multiple repositories at New York University. To access the contents of the collection, please review this collection guide and contact the appropriate repository.

Image: Aladdin and His Lamp movie poster, 1952. Photograph by GION Studio; Jack G. Shaheen Papers; TAM.535; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.