In this groundbreaking book, leading Arab and Jewish intellectuals examine how and why the Holocaust and the Nakba are interlinked without blurring fundamental differences between them. While these two foundational tragedies are often discussed separately and in abstraction from the constitutive historical global contexts of nationalism and colonialism, The Holocaust and the Nakba explores the historical, political, and cultural intersections between them. The majority of the contributors argue that these intersections are embedded in cultural imaginations, colonial and asymmetrical power relations, realities, and structures. Focusing on them paves the way for a new political, historical, and moral grammar that enables a joint Arab-Jewish dwelling and supports historical reconciliation in Israel/Palestine.
This book does not seek to draw a parallel or comparison between the Holocaust and Nakba or to merely inaugurate a "dialogue" between them. Instead, it searches for a new historical and political grammar for relating and narrating their complicated intersections. The book features prominent international contributors, including a foreword by Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury on the centrality of the Holocaust and Nakba in the essential struggle of humanity against racism, and an afterword by literary scholar Jacqueline Rose on the challenges and contributions of the linkage between the Holocaust and Nakba for power to shift and a world of justice and equality to be created between the two peoples. The Holocaust and the Nakba is the first extended and collective scholarly treatment in English of these two constitutive traumas together.
Industry Reviews
Bashir Bashir, Amos Goldberg, and seventeen contributors have produced a powerful and incisive book that deserves the attention of everyone interested in central European history. -- Doris L. Bergen * Central European History *
In their edited collection of essays, Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg (with a forward by Elias Khoury and an afterword by Jacqueline Rose) have created a much needed intellectual space for a topic that has become increasingly politically taboo and thereby subject to multiple modes of censorship (academic and beyond). -- Anya Topolski * Patterns of Prejudice *
[A] pathbreaking book. -- Alon Confino * The New Fascism Syllabus *
The Holocaust and the Nakba is an original and timely volume that sheds new light into our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By putting these two traumas together, it challenges what many would consider a blasphemous comparison and refutes any binary approaches to explaining one of the most intractable conflicts of the twentieth century. It provides us with new modes of thinking needed for transcending the ongoing political impasse and building a true historical reconciliation in Israel/Palestine. -- Leila Farsakh, author of Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation
The key to unlock the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is hiding in the field of psycho-politics. This book offers the readers a new courageous reading for the painful traumatic rivalry that continues to mold the two national communities-the Holocaust and the Nakba. The remarkably insightful, yet challenging, arguments pursued by leading Arab and Jewish intellectuals and scholars in this volume bring a ray of hope during these gloomy times. -- Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Knesset, author of The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From its Ashes
Bringing together the Holocaust and the Nakba in a joint meditation is a taboo that this salutary book boldly breaks. In discussing the many ways in which the Palestinian Nakba and its Arab representation are intertwined with the Jewish Holocaust and its Israeli representation, it provides the reader with much to mull over at this climactic juncture in the relation between Israel and its Palestinian 'other.' -- Gilbert Achcar, author of The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives
Of the many points of conflict in Israel-Palestine, none is as confounding as the intersecting claims of collective suffering. At once historical and normative, this landmark volume is the first to reprise the many ways in which the relationship between the Holocaust and Nakba have been imagined since the 1940s. The editors propose a bold, even revolutionary framework for relating these traumas that is a necessary provocation to entrenched patterns of memory. -- A. Dirk Moses, author of German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past
Rarely do scholarly works attain the moral and political significance of The Holocaust and the Nakba. Bashir and Goldberg's essential volume brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of prominent thinkers to address one of the world's thorniest problems: how to think through the conflicting narratives of Israelis and Palestinians about their respective traumatic experiences. Without flinching but with considerable nuance, the book offers a crucial ethical and political vision of binational coexistence premised on decolonization and mutual recognition. -- Michael Rothberg, author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators
A ground-breaking book....a remarkably curated collection of interventions that together constitute a new theoretical approach, methodology, and "grammar" to put into dialogue the Holocaust and the Nakba...This book is welcome, long overdue, and will quickly become a canonical text in Middle East Studies. * Arab Studies Quarterly *
