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.

Full Product Details

9781412846141

Table of Contents

Reviews

<p> 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 <p> 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. <p> --Bruce Kesler, San Diego Jewish World <p> 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 Alexander's critical appraisal of the state of the Jews reinforces his place of primacy in the continuing war, waged by far too few of our academic or intellectual colleagues, against Israel. <p> --Jerold S. Auerbach, Algemeiner <p> To open the lid of this much-traveled steamer trunk is to experience Alexander's perceptive mind, dry humor, and exquisite sense of irony. Alexander is an entertaining dinner guest at your mental dining room table. <p> --Robert Wilkes, jtnews.net <p> [A] besieged people shows signs of cracking under the pressure as many of its most talented

<p> By turns tough-minded and elegant, witty and contentious, Edward Alexander's essays and reviews engage their subjects in bracing and always illuminating ways. Anyone who wants to learn about 'the state of the Jews' will find Alexander a perceptive and provocative guide. A brilliant polemicist, he has few rivals among commentators on contemporary Jewish themes. <p> --Alvin H. Rosenfeld, professor of English and Jewish studies, Irving M. Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies, director, Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, Indiana University <p> To anyone conscious of the extent to which the higher journalism today, both in America and Europe, trades in willed self-delusion, these essays will come as a decided relief. Witty, pungent, brutally intelligent and wickedly well informed, they demonstrate that the American mind, in spite of everything, is alive and kicking. Alexander's range is enviably wide. . . . Inevitably, many of these essays touch on the antisemitism once again haunting intellectual discourse. Because antisemitism has killed so many people, we tend to treat it, sometimes grudgingly, with respect. These essays reveal it squarely for what it is: a delusion of the very stupid; a standing offence against the wit, humanity, intelligence, and decency that Alexander's work so abundantly embodies. <p> --Bernard Harrison, Emeritus E. E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy, University of Utah, emeritus professor in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Sussex, UK <p> One reads this book with moral and aesthetic admiration. Its frightening message is that the so-called 'new antisemitism' is really the old antisemitism in a new disguise. It is a page-turner. Edward Alexander is battle-toughened in the trenches of intellectual combat. He knows his Jews, his Judaism, his history, and he sees through the disguises of their enemies with the accuracy of a veteran marksman. You could not find a better guide through the underworld of latter-day Jew-hatr

<p> 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. <p> --Arnold Ages, Chicago Jewish Star <p> 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. <p> --Bruce Kesler, San Diego Jewish World <p> 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 Alexander's critical appraisal of the state of the Jews reinforces his place of primacy in the continuing war, waged by far too few of our academic or intellectual colleagues, against Israel. <p> --Jerold S. Auerbach, Algemeiner <p> To open the lid of this much-traveled steamer trunk is to experience Alexander's perceptive mind, dry humor, and exquisite sense of irony. Alexander is an entertaining dinner guest at your mental dining room table. <p> --Robert Wilkes, jtnews.net <p> [A] besieged people shows signs of cracking under the pressure as many of its most tale

Author Information

Edward Alexander is professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. He has been a member of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, the National Association of Scholars, and the Washington Association of Scholars. He is the author of The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies, The Holocaust and the War of Ideas, and Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available