Buch, Englisch, 264 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 454 g
A Critical Appraisal
Buch, Englisch, 264 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 454 g
ISBN: 978-1-138-51697-7
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd
The State of the Jews examines the current predicament of the Jewish people and the land of Israel, both of which still stand at the storm center of history, because Jews can never take the right to live as a natural right.
The volume comprises celebrations and attacks. Edward Alexander celebrates writers like Abba Kovner, Cynthia Ozick, Ruth Wisse, and Hillel Halkin, who recognized in the foundation of Israel shortly after the destruction of European Jewry one of the few redeeming events in a century of blood and shame. He attacks Israel's external enemies busy planners of boycotts, brazen advocates of politicide, professorial apologists for suicide bombing and also its internal enemies. These are "anti-Zionist" Jews, devotees of lost causes willfully blind to the fact that Israel's creation was an event of biblical magnitude. Indifference to Jewish survival during World War II was the admitted moral failure of earlier American-Jewish intellectuals, but today's "progressives" and "New Diasporists" call indifference virtue, and mistake cowardice for courage.
Because the new anti-Semitism, tightening the noose around Israel's throat, emanates mainly from liberals, Alexander analyzes both antisemitic and philosemitic strains in three prominent Victorian liberals: Thomas Arnold, his son Matthew, and John Stuart Mill. The main body of Alexander's book is divided generically into history, politics, and literature. At a deeper level, its chapters are integrated by the book's pervasive concern: the interconnectedness between the state of Israel and the spiritual state of contemporary Jewry.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Fachgebiete
- Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Kultursoziologie
- Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Kultur- und Sozialethnologie: Allgemeines
- Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Stadt- und Regionalsoziologie
- Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Regionalwissenschaften, Regionalstudien
Weitere Infos & Material
Introduction; I: The Victorian Background; Dr Arnold, Matthew Arnold, and John Stuart Mill; II: History; Britannia Waives the Rules: Antisemitism, English-Style; British Philosemitism: A Thing of the Past?; Medieval Zionism: Yehuda Halevi; Hitler’s American Professors; Hitler’s (Palestinian) Arabs; Beethoven and the Holocaust in Hungary; Israel’s “Original Sin”: The Refugees of 1948; “If I Am Not for Myself, Who Will Be for Me?” The History of Commentary Magazine; End of the Holocaust?; III: Politics; Survival Precedes Definition: Ruth Wisse’s Moral Imperative; “Pharaoh Who Knew Not Joseph”: Obama Demotes the Jews; The Meaning of Criticism; Professors for Suicide Bombing: The Explosive Power of Boredom; Back to 1933: How the Academic Boycott of Israel Began; Afrocentrism, Liberal Dogmatism, and Antisemitism at Wellesley College; Tom Paulin: Poetaster of Murder; Jewish Israel-Haters Convert Their Dead Grandmothers: A New Mormonism?; The Antisemitism of Liberals: A Gentile’s View; IV: Literature; Lionel Trilling: The ( Jewish) Road Not Taken; Metaphor and Memory in Cynthia Ozick: Pro and Con; Foreign Bodies: Americans Abroad in Post-Holocaust Europe; Saul Bellow’s Jewish Letters; Lublin Before It Became Majdanek: Jacob Glatstein’s Autobiography; Abba Kovner: Partisan, Poet, Curator, Avenger; Ashamed Jews: The Finkler Question; Daniel Deronda: “The Zionist Fate in English Hands” and “The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews”
