The State of the Jews: A Critical Appraisal
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.

1110866338
The State of the Jews: A Critical Appraisal
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.

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The State of the Jews: A Critical Appraisal

The State of the Jews: A Critical Appraisal

by Edward Alexander (Editor)
The State of the Jews: A Critical Appraisal

The State of the Jews: A Critical Appraisal

by Edward Alexander (Editor)

Hardcover

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Overview

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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781412846141
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Publication date: 07/15/2012
Pages: 264
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Edward Alexander is professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies, The Holocaust and the War of Ideas, Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew, and Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe.

Table of Contents

Preamble: A Walk through the Table of Contents-and a Linguistic Alert xiii

Acknowledgments xv

Introduction 1

I The Victorian Background 13

Dr. Arnold, Matthew Arnold, and John Stuart Mill 15

II History 41

Britannia Waives the Rules: Antisemitism, English-Style 43

British Philosemitism: A Thing of the Past? 53

Medieval Zionism: Yehuda Halevi 59

Hitler's American Professors 65

Hitler's (Palestinian) Arabs 71

Beethoven and the Holocaust in Hungary 75

Israel's "Original Sin": The Refugees of 1948 81

"If I Am Not for Myself, Who Will Be for Me?" The History of Commentary Magazine 87

End of the Holocaust? 95

III Politics 103

Survival Precedes Definition: Ruth Wisse's Moral Imperative 105

"Pharaoh Who Knew Not Joseph": Obama Demotes the Jews 113

The Meaning of Criticism 123

Professors for Suicide Bombing: The Explosive Power of Boredom 129

Back to 1933: How the Academic Boycott of Israel Began 139

Afrocentrism, Liberal Dogmatism, and Antisemitism at Wellesley College 145

Tom Paulin: Poetaster of Murder 151

Jewish Israel-Haters Convert Their Dead Grandmothers: A New Mormonism? 159

The Antisemitism of Liberals: A Gentile's View 165

IV Literature 171

Lionel Trilling: The (Jewish) Road Not Taken 173

Metaphor and Memory in Cynthia Ozick: Pro and Con 181

Foreign Bodies: Americans Abroad in Post-Holocaust Europe 195

Saul Bellow's Jewish Letters 201

Lublin Before It Became Majdanek: Jacob Glatstein's Autobiography 207

Abba Kovner: Partisan, Poet, Curator, Avenger 213

Ashamed Jews: The Finkler Question 219

Daniel Deronda: "The Zionist Fate in English Hands" and "The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews" 227

Index 241

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