1300 187 187
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.
"Alexander's book, in each exquisitely polished entry, identifies what Rabelais used to call 'the essential marrow' of the issue....[He] is a powerful polemicist who possesses a biting sense of humor...In this collection of essays, all of which display Alexander's matchless English prose style, it is difficult to single out favorites."
--Arnold Ages, Chicago Jewish Star
"Edward Alexander is... one of the better informed writers on matters Jewish... Alexander's decades in front of his classes come through not as direct statements of the one true fact but rather as discussions of the varying experiences and writings of philo- and anti-semites, and as a good professor leaves his students wanting to learn more. Especially in an age in which the study of classics of Western thought is ignored, or chastised as irrelevant or oppressive to current ideological fervors, Alexander's precis and discussion of many famous authors' works does a service in awakening the reader's interest in delving further... [I]n 238-pages the reader can delve into the past few hundred years of culture that shaped today's anti-semitism."
--Bruce Kesler, San Diego Jewish World
"In his latest magisterial collection of essays devoted to the Jewish struggle for survival. . . [Edward Alexander] has many lessons to teach us. . . . [An] eloquent and courageous volume. Anyone who believes that anti-Semitism should be exposed and not denied or explained away, that the Holocaust was first and foremost a crime against the Jewish people and not an offense against liberalism, and that Jews are entitled to defend themselves and to preserve their own state in their own homeland, will find in Edward Alexander's writings a goldmine."
--Paul Bogdanor, Society
"Alexander's most scathing analysis focuses on academic anti-Semitism and the collaboration of Jewish liberals in the demotion of Israel to the fetid sewer of illegitimacy until recently reserved for Nazi Germany and South Africa... Edward
| Preamble: A Walk through the Table of Contents-and a Linguistic Alert | p. xiii |
| Acknowledgments | p. xv |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| The Victorian Background | p. 13 |
| Dr. Arnold, Matthew Arnold, and John Stuart Mill | p. 15 |
| History | p. 41 |
| Britannia Waives the Rules: Antisemitism, English-Style | p. 43 |
| British Philosemitism: A Thing of the Past? | p. 53 |
| Medieval Zionism: Yehuda Halevi | p. 59 |
| Hitler's American Professors | p. 65 |
| Hitler's (Palestinian) Arabs | p. 71 |
| Beethoven and the Holocaust in Hungary | p. 75 |
| Israel's "Original Sin": The Refugees of 1948 | p. 81 |
| "If I Am Not for Myself, Who Will Be for Me?" The History of Commentary Magazine | p. 87 |
| End of the Holocaust? | p. 95 |
| Politics | p. 103 |
| Survival Precedes Definition: Ruth Wisse's Moral Imperative | p. 105 |
| "Pharaoh Who Knew Not Joseph": Obama Demotes the Jews | p. 113 |
| The Meaning of Criticism | p. 123 |
| Professors for Suicide Bombing: The Explosive Power of Boredom | p. 129 |
| Back to 1933: How the Academic Boycott of Israel Began | p. 139 |
| Afrocentrism, Liberal Dogmatism, and Antisemitism at Wellesley College | p. 145 |
| Tom Paulin: Poetaster of Murder | p. 151 |
| Jewish Israel-Haters Convert Their Dead Grandmothers: A New Mormonism? | p. 159 |
| The Antisemitism of Liberals: A Gentile's View | p. 165 |
| Literature | p. 171 |
| Lionel Trilling: The (Jewish) Road Not Taken | p. 173 |
| Metaphor and Memory in Cynthia Ozick: Pro and Con | p. 181 |
| Foreign Bodies: Americans Abroad in Post-Holocaust Europe | p. 195 |
| Saul Bellow's Jewish Letters | p. 201 |
| Lublin Before It Became Majdanek: Jacob Glatstein's Autobiography | p. 207 |
| Abba Kovner: Partisan, Poet, Curator, Avenger | p. 213 |
| Ashamed Jews: The Finkler Question | p. 219 |
| Daniel Deronda: "The Zionist Fate in English Hands" and "The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews" | p. 227 |
| Index | p. 241 |
| Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
ISBN: 9781412846141
ISBN-10: 1412846145
Audience:
General
Format:
Hardcover
Language:
English
Number Of Pages: 220
Published: 14th June 2012
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Dimensions (cm): 23.6 x 16.5
x 1.9
Weight (kg): 0.505
9am - 4pm AEST, Monday - Friday
