The Middle Eastern Culture site at BellaOnline covers all aspects of Middle and Near-Eastern Culture, ancient and modern. Topics include such things as language, daily life, art, food, and folklore. I tend to avoid current events articles, unless I believe they will be of historical interest, as there is site devoted to current events here at BellaOnline. I use a very inclusive definition of the Middle East/Near East, similar to that used by the Library of Congress. This is a very large area and a large time period, so naturally, topic coverage is not exhaustive, but give me time. The Middle East is the birthplace of three major world religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. BellaOnline has sites devoted to each of these religions, however none of the Christianity sites cover the Middle Eastern Christian traditions; thus Middle Eastern Christianity gets more coverage on this site than Judaism and Islam. Similarly, topics that tend to be popular, usually get more coverage. If you have an area of interest that you'd like to see more about, feel free to contact me via the forum or the contact form to make suggestions.

There are a number of ways to keep track of new content on the Middle Eastern Culture site. We have a weekly email newsletter for the Middle Eastern Culture site. The newsletter comes out once a week, usually on Tuesdays and includes information about the latest articles on the site. The newsletter is published in both text format so it can be read by any email client.

To subscribe to the newsletter, enter your email address in the box at the bottom of the page. We promise to keep your email confidential and use it only to send you the newsletter. If you want to check out the newsletter first, see the archive of recent newsletters below. You can also read current and past issues of the newsletter online in the newsletter archives.

We also have two RSS feeds. If you aren't familiar with RSS, it allows you to use an RSS reader or aggregater to receive content from different websites on your computer (or a web page, depending on how you set it up) as it is added. This process is referred to as subscribing to a site. Many web browsers and email programs include an RSS reader, so all you have to do is set it up. One of the best introductions to using RSS is Sharon B's RSS notes. Click on the feed of your choice below to subscribe.

RSS Feed for the Middle Eastern Culture Site

This feed shows the title and summary of each new article as it is added to the site.

RSS Feed for the Forum

This feed notifies you whenever a new topic is started in the Middle Eastern Culture forum.

I look forward to keeping in touch! - Julie