Description
Book SynopsisThis book brings together leading scholars to consider how the “Jewish Question” and the “Arab Question” are entangled historically and in the present day. It offers critical analyses of Arab engagements with the question of Jewish rights alongside Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish considerations of Palestinian identity and political rights.
Trade ReviewThese thoughtful essays help us to understand how the destruction of ways of life (and of life itself) by pan-Arabism and Zionism—each claiming to assist the rebirth of a victimized people—and how the self-definition of a “new Europe” after the Holocaust, by repressing the memory of its murderous colonial history, has helped to shape our menacing present.
The Arab and Jewish Questions is essential reading for all who wish to think productively about a human future beyond the nation-state, the modern collectivity whose ability to generate hatred toward “enemies” is not unique but whose power to bring about catastrophe is. -- Talal Asad, author of
Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative ReasonDrawing on philosophy, politics, poetry, psychoanalysis, and history, and extending from North Africa and the Mediterranean to Europe and North America, this powerful book poses the Arab and Jewish questions as inextricable, intimate, and hybrid forces that shape our desires and our unimagined futures. -- Sherene Seikaly, author of
Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate PalestineOriginal and thoughtfully articulated, this volume will become the first port of call to illuminate the relationship between the Jewish and Arab questions. A must-read for scholars of Palestine, Israel, Jewish and Palestinian studies, Zionism, and the modern European history of racism. -- Alon Confino, author of
A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to GenocideBreaking through both disciplinary and political barriers, this bold volume takes the discussion of “Jews and Arabs” in new directions. Its unique group of contributors brings together history, politics, religion, and literature, challenging us to think differently about how and why Jews and Arabs have mattered for the West, for the Middle East, and most of all, for each other. An indispensable reference point for insights into the past and future of two intertwined issues, which jointly constitute one of the major questions of our times. -- Lital Levy, author of
Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/PalestineThe invention of Arab and Jewish 'questions' in Europe and their importation to late Ottoman societies ruptured mutually constitutive relationships that defined a distinctive civilizational pattern of coexistence. In interrogating the national(ist) identities that lie at the broken heart of todays' political imaginaries, this timely book points to a future beyond their separatist terms. -- A. Dirk Moses, author of
The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of TransgressionReaching beyond the siloed debates that often mark studies of Jews and Arabs in European and Middle Eastern contexts, this path-breaking volume opens unexpected conversations across several fields and geographic sites from the nineteenth century to contemporary Israel/Palestine. With a commitment to understanding the consolidation and unraveling of contingent identities and collective national projects—as well as the intimate connections between disparate struggles for self-determination—the contributors to
The Arab and Jewish Questions guide us with new ways of thinking through the history and political evolution of Zionism, the Palestinian question, and Jewish-Arab relations. -- Seth Anziska, author of
Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to OsloSpecialists in Israel and Palestine studies in particular will
find rich material with which to grapple. * Arab Studies Quarterly *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Three Questions That Make One, by Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh
Part I. Interrogating Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and Colonialism1. Jackals and Arabs: Once More on the German-Jewish Dialogue, by Gil Anidjar
2. An Emblematic Embrace: New Europe, the Jewish State, and the Palestinian Question, by Brian Klug
3. Palestine in Algeria: The Emergence of an Arab-Islamic Question in the Interwar Period, by Amal Ghazal
Part II. Beyond the Binary Division Between “Jews” and “Arabs”: Revisiting National Constructs4. On Orientalist Genealogies: The Split Arab/Jew Figure Revisited, by Ella Shohat
5. Returning to the Question of Europe: From the Standpoint of the Defeated, by Hakem Al-Rustom
6. Between Shared Homeland to National Home: The Balfour Declaration from a Native Sephardic Perspective, by Yuval Evri and Hillel Cohen
7. Toward a Field of Israel/Palestine Studies, by Derek Penslar
Part III. Stubborn Realities and Alternative Visions for Palestine/Israel8. Apocalypse/Emnity/Dialogue: Negotiating the Depths, by Jacqueline Rose
9. Competing Marxisms, Cessation of (
Settler) Colonialism, and the One-State Solution in Israel-Palestine, by Moshe Behar
10. Dialectic of the National Identities in Palestinian Society and Israeli Society: Nationalism and Binationalism, by Maram Masarwi
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
