Saturday Reading List: More on Israel and Gaza
These are some of the more interesting pieces I’v been reading this week:
Theodore R. Johnson, “Was the Boston Tea Party an act of terrorism? It depends.”
Earlier this semester, during a discussion on the need for protests and its limits, I asked how one should view the American Revolution. Students separated our war of independence from other violent rebellions — showing them that how we judge actions often depends on how we see the goals.
Johnson answers the argument in this way:
Yet there’s another version of the event, one less suitable for national mythology. A horde of White men disguised themselves as Native Americans — coppering their faces and donning headdresses in the same tradition that would lead to blackfaced minstrel shows decades later — to commit seditious conspiracy and destroy private property. The riotous mob trespassed on three ships and destroyed goods worth nearly $2 million in today’s money — all because they didn’t want to obey a duly passed law.
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Two related essays — the first by Masha Gesten and the second from John Ganz. Gessen’s long essay in The New Yorker talks about the Israeli war on Gaza, Jewish memory, the Holocaust, and Jewish ethics — which included uncomfortable (and questionable) comparisons between Zionism and Nazism. These comparisons led to a row over their receiving a prize named for German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt. Gessen will get the prize, but there will be no ceremony.
John Ganz explains why this is inconsistent with Arendt’s own philosophical and ethical approach.
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Interesting piece in Haaretz on the rift between American and Israeli Jews. Mondoweiss takes a more ideological approach to the same issue: “This is a naked expression of the power of the Israel lobby to enforce Zionist orthodoxy in official life.”
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An essay in The Daily Forward defends the three university presidents targeted by the GOP.
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Finally, one of my students has an op-ed at the Times of Israel on the atmosphere for Jews at Rutgers. It is a well-written and well-argued piece.