Anthropology of the Middle East, Vol. 11, No. 2, Winter 2016: 113–130 © Berghahn Books doi:10.3167/ame.2016.110209 • ISSN 1746-0719 (Print) • ISSN 1746-0727 (Online) Reports Publications Keith Feldman (2015), A Shadow Over Palestine: e Imperial Life of Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) A Shadow Over Palestine: e Imperial Life of Race in America boldly confronts what Edward Said famously called ‘America’s last taboo’. It situates the Israeli occupation of Palestine at the centre of a sweeping, yet nuanced, analysis of post–Second World War contestations over the meaning and practice of anti- racism and anti-colonialism. is book also addresses the marginalisation of Palestine within the fields of Ethnic Studies and American Studies, arguing that anti-Arab racism and the U.S. role in the Middle East must be understood as key elements in Cold War domestic racial formations. Crossing discipli- nary as well as geographic borders, A Shadow Over Palestine contributes to an emerging body of transnational ethnic studies scholarship that places different histories of dispossession and resistance in relation to one another. As the United States and the Soviet Union maneuvered to exert their com- peting interests over the decolonising world, the U.S. political establishment embraced an official liberal anti-racism, both in response to pressure from the civil rights movement and in an effort to mute international criticism over the treatment of African-American people in the heart of the ‘free world’. At the same time, the U.S. also cemented its ties to Israel through a set of racial and imperial logics that Feldman carefully parses and historicises. He argues that the apparent contradiction between promoting the inclusion of racial minori- ties within the U.S. body politic, on the one hand, and intensifying military, economic and political support for the occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people, on the other, reveals the extent to which liberal democracy is bounded by an expansionist racial capitalism. Anxiety over how to respond to the challenges of communism, Black power and other race radical move- ments in the late 1960s and early 1970s helped to fuel a consensus among wide swaths of the U.S. public that Israel had to be defended as an outpost of shared values and interests in a hostile world. e figure of the Black Panther and the