Tag
Israel
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When Universities Are Agents of the State
The story of Israeli universities serves as a warning for what US academia could become.
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Our Siege Is Long
Throughout his life, poet Muin Bseiso narrated the history of Palestinian struggle and criticized Western portrayals of Gaza. Today, Bseiso’s son dodges Israeli bombs to preserve his archives.
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Writing the Counter-Book: Joshua Cohen with Eugene Sheppard
“I was exorcising, if not the anxiety of influence, then the accusations of the anxiety of influence, and also issuing somewhat of a corrective.”
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Elvis’s Missing Belt: Tel Aviv, Israel
“As a teenager, I also worked at HaMeshulash for several months. It’s quite possible that I was the worst waiter in the history of the café.”
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Gaza: Landscapes of Exclusion and Violence
Design can lift some communities. But it can also subject others to live precariously, often at the same time.
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The Netanya-who?s: Gossip and Other Kinds of History
Benzion Netanyahu—father of the former prime minister—is not the protagonist; rather, it is his scholarship and the practice of history itself.[none-for-homepage]
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Re-embodying Palestinian Memory
A recent flourishing of Palestinian literature reckons with complications in historical memory caused by settler colonialism.
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How Liberal Americans Sustain Israel’s Occupation
Why has the United States historically supported Israel? And should the …
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“They Demolish Our Houses while We Build Theirs”
The West Bank’s central highlands harbor some of the best quality dolomitic …
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“Sharing” the Israeli Occupation
In April of 2014, an Israeli combat soldier from the Nahal Brigade named David Adamov was captured on camera violently threatening a Palestinian teenager in Hebron. After a video of the event posted on YouTube went viral, Adamov was suspended by the military. His suspension instigated a social media protest, with soldiers from his unit…
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Walking with the Unconsoled
What can we expect imaginative writing to do in the face of unalleviated grief? If one of fiction’s strengths remains its expression of irreducibly singular minds, what role then might it play in unbinding the grieving individual from self-isolation? In the slender and unclassifiable narrative Falling Out of Time, David Grossman tackles these entwined questions by connecting one…
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For the Love of Israel
In 1963, after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt exchanged a series of tense letters. Scholem, a renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism and himself a critic of Zionism and its excesses, assailed Arendt for her wishy-washy support of Israel and for an overall deficit of love for the Jewish people.…
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Polish Dreams
I often joke that everything I know about Israel I learned from comic books. As a secular Jew with deep ambivalence about Israel, this quip has served as a shield against being engaged on the topic by friends and colleagues on either side of the Zionist divide. So imagine my surprise when I recently gave…
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Scientific Semitism: Exceptional or Exemplary?
For at least 1,500 years, the Jewish people have defined themselves through genealogical practices: according to Jewish law, a person is Jewish simply because he or she is born of a Jewish mother. If there is one belief that defines Judaism and the Jewish people, it is belief in the existence of Jewish collectivity, genealogically…
