Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza
A Reckoning
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- 6,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A bold, urgent appeal from the acclaimed columnist and political commentator, addressing one of the most important issues of our time
“In Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, Peter Beinart offers a model for writing a new story when inherited narratives no longer hold. . . . Stylistically restrained and uncompromising, the book stands as a brave and vital contribution to contemporary American intellectual life, challenging readers to reckon with the demands of justice, equity, and accountability in the face of one of the most consequential and divisive issues of our time.” —Judges’ Citation, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction
In Peter Beinart’s view, one story dominates Jewish communal life: that of persecution and victimhood. It is a story that erases much of the nuance of Jewish religious tradition and warps our understanding of Israel and Palestine. After Gaza, where Jewish texts, history, and language have been deployed to justify mass slaughter and starvation, Beinart argues, Jews must tell a new story. After this war, whose horror will echo for generations, they must do nothing less than offer a new answer to the question: What does it mean to be a Jew?
Beinart imagines an alternate narrative, which would draw on other nations’ efforts at moral reconstruction and a different reading of Jewish tradition. A story in which Israeli Jews have the right to equality, not supremacy, and in which Jewish and Palestinian safety are not mutually exclusive but intertwined. One that recognizes the danger of venerating states at the expense of human life.
Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza is a provocative argument that will expand and inform one of the defining conversations of our time. It is a book that only Peter Beinart could write: a passionate yet measured work that brings together his personal experience, his commanding grasp of history, his keen understanding of political and moral dilemmas, and a clear vision for the future.
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Beinart (The Crisis of Zionism), editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, issues an impassioned critique of the American Jewish community's reaction to the war in Gaza. According to the author, "even Jews who are genuinely pained by Gaza's agony" have convinced themselves that Israel's outsize military response is necessary "to keep us safe," hijacking historical narratives that frame Jews as a perennially victimized people as a justification for Israel to wield "life and death power over millions of Palestinians who lack even a passport." To rebut such narratives, he draws from Israeli government records that attribute most of the Palestinian Arab departures from their homes and lands during the late 1940s to "Zionist attacks," pointing to a deliberate strategy of expulsion to create a Jewish-majority state. In denying legal equality to most of the country's Palestinian residents, Israel is "not merely offering Jews the right to determine their own lives" but "dominance over another people," Beinart writes. He draws especially intriguing links between the "moral evasion" of what's happening in Gaza by some diasporic Jews and increasing Jewish secularization, which, he argues, is replacing a more overtly moralistic "rabbinic tradition" that demands Jews "look inward and reckon with their sins." Urgent and thought-provoking, this is sure to spark debate.
