The Arab and Jewish Questions

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 *