Description
Nineteenth-century Europe turned the political status of its Jewish communities into the "Jewish Question," as both Christianity and rising forms of nationalism viewed Jews as the ultimate other. With the onset of Zionism, this "question" migrated to Palestine and intensified under British colonial rule and in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Zionism's attempt to solve the "Jewish Question" created what came to be known as the "Arab Question," which concerned the presence and rights of the Arab population in Palestine. For the most part, however, Jewish settlers denied or dismissed the question they created, to the detriment of both Arabs and Jews in Palestine and elsewhere.
This book brings together leading scholars to consider how these two questions 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. Together, the essays show that the Arab and Jewish questions, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which they have become subsumed, belong to the same thorny history. Despite their major differences, the historical Jewish and Arab questions are about the political rights of oppressed groups and their inclusion within exclusionary political communities-a question that continues to foment tensions in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Shedding new light on the intricate relationships among Orientalism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, colonialism, and the impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this book reveals the inseparability of Arab and Jewish struggles for self-determination and political equality.
Contributors include Gil Anidjar, Brian Klug, Amal Ghazal, Ella Shohat, Hakem Al-Rustom, Hillel Cohen, Yuval Evri, Derek Penslar, Jacqueline Rose, Moshe Behar, Maram Masarwi, and the editors, Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh.
About the Author
Bashir Bashir is associate professor in the Department of Sociology, Political Science, and Communication at the Open University of Israel and a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He is coeditor of The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies (2008) and The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia, 2018).
Leila Farsakh is associate professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her books include Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, Land, and Occupation, second edition (2012).
Reviews
These 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 Reason
Drawing 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 Palestine
Original 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 Genocide
Breaking 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/Palestine
The 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 Transgression
Reaching 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 Oslo
Specialists in Israel and Palestine studies in particular will
find rich material with which to grapple. * Arab Studies Quarterly *
Book Information
ISBN 9780231199216
Author Bashir Bashir
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press
This book brings together leading scholars to consider how these two questions 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. Together, the essays show that the Arab and Jewish questions, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which they have become subsumed, belong to the same thorny history. Despite their major differences, the historical Jewish and Arab questions are about the political rights of oppressed groups and their inclusion within exclusionary political communities-a question that continues to foment tensions in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Shedding new light on the intricate relationships among Orientalism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, colonialism, and the impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this book reveals the inseparability of Arab and Jewish struggles for self-determination and political equality.
Contributors include Gil Anidjar, Brian Klug, Amal Ghazal, Ella Shohat, Hakem Al-Rustom, Hillel Cohen, Yuval Evri, Derek Penslar, Jacqueline Rose, Moshe Behar, Maram Masarwi, and the editors, Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh.
About the Author
Bashir Bashir is associate professor in the Department of Sociology, Political Science, and Communication at the Open University of Israel and a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He is coeditor of The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies (2008) and The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia, 2018).
Leila Farsakh is associate professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her books include Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, Land, and Occupation, second edition (2012).
Reviews
These 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 Reason
Drawing 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 Palestine
Original 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 Genocide
Breaking 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/Palestine
The 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 Transgression
Reaching 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 Oslo
Specialists in Israel and Palestine studies in particular will
find rich material with which to grapple. * Arab Studies Quarterly *
Book Information
ISBN 9780231199216
Author Bashir Bashir
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press
