Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People “makes waves in London”

The Saudi Gazette has picked up on the disruption and heckling that occured during Shlomo Sand’s ‘In Conversation with the New Statesman’ event at Border’s Bookshop. Witnessing last week’s event, Susannah Tarbush writes:

 

 

 

Border’s bookshop in Charing Cross Road, central London, is normally a tranquil haven where book lovers can browse the shelves at leisure and perhaps refresh themselves at the in-house café.

But last week the shop’s calm was shattered by the uproar that erupted during the launch of one of the most controversial books to have been published in London this year: the English-language version of Israeli historian Shlomo Sand’s “The Invention of the Jewish People.”

During the launch certain hard-line supporters of Israel in the audience shouted hostile remarks at the author to the annoyance of other attendees. The vocal pro-Israel faction included Jonathan Hoffman, co-vice chair of the Zionist Federation in Britain, who declared: “Why, Shlomo Sand, have you chosen to write an anti-Semitic book: was it because of the fame, or was it because of the money?” Sand vigorously denied that his book was anti-Semitic and answered his critics’ various points robustly.

Read the full article here.

The Invention of the Jewish People is available from Verso.

John Gray reviews Slavoj Žižek’s First as Tragedy, Then as Farce for the Independent

The political philosopher John Gray, who warned in the New Statesman “Western progressives nostalgic for the Soviet Union shouldn’t get too excited by the global financial crisis”, reviews Slavoj Žižek’s latest First as Tragedy, Then as Farce in the Independent today alongside Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri’s Commonwealth, the final book in the trilogy with Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004):

No longer confined to dingy meetings of ageing Trotskyites or the longueurs of the academic seminar, communism has been reinvented as a kind of intellectual cabaret act. The 20th century’s biggest mistake is being marketed as high-end entertainment, with a modish neo-Bolshevism promising the jaded consumer an exciting experience of forbidden ideas…

A Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalytical theorist and film critic, Zizek has become a gadfly of the left establishment, a prolific provocateur whose principal aim seems to be to confound his tender-minded readers. His target throughout this book is not the right but the soft, democratic, meliorist left, which imagines that the egalitarian goals of communism can be realised by non-repressive, liberal means.

Zizek is savagely scornful of this view, writing sharply that “One of the mantras of the postmodern left has been that we should finally leave behind the ‘Jacobin-Leninist paradigm’ of centralised dictatorial power. But perhaps the time has now come to turn this mantra around… Now, more than ever, one should insist on the ‘eternal Idea of Communism’”

Read the full review here.

Verso publishes Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project and Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy by Negri. Hardt & Negri are contributers to Debating Empire.

The new film by Astra Taylor, the director of Zizek!, opens tonight. Examined Life features Žižek and Judith Butler, amongst other philosophers. The Times says ”Examined Life unfolds like a companion piece to Richard Linklater’s 2001 cartoon Waking Life.”

Win Trotsky t-shirt and Deutscher biography ‘The Prophet’

Our friends Philosophy Football have created a wonderful new t-shirt bearing Trotsky’s wise words that:

“The revolution will inevitably awaken in the British working class the deepest passions which have been diverted along artificial channels with the aid of football.”

Verso has just made available a 3-volume discounted set of Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky, The Prophet.

Tariq Ali recently said of Deutscher’s work:

For over half a century, Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume biography of Trotsky, a literary-historical masterpiece in its own right, was regarded as the last word on the subject. Many who were deeply hostile to the Russian revolution and all its leading actors nonetheless acclaimed these books: in 1997, asked to nominate his favourite book for National Book Day, the newly elected prime minister, Tony Blair, nominated the trilogy.

Each book in the set is also available individually:

The Prophet Armed:  Trotsky 1879-1921

The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-1929

The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940

WIN!

We have one t-shirt and one set of Deutscher’s legendary biography to give away. To win answer two questions:

• Name the text that the above quote from Trotsky comes from.
• What was the name of the Mexican muralist who attempted to assassinate Trotsky?

Entrants must email their answers to enquiries AT verso.co.uk (twitters and comment responses will not be accepted!), with their names and the addresses to which the prize should be sent. The first correct answer will win. The competition is only open to those outside of North America.

Shlomo Sand’s Invention of the Jewish People reviewed in The Tablet

Catholic journal The Tablet has reviewed Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People:

To call Shlomo Sand’s new book “challenging” would be an understatement. The challenge begins with the English title: it goes  further than a literal translation of the original Hebrew, which would be “When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?” What is undoubted is that what Sand is attempting to expose has wide appeal: it is unusual to find a book by a university academic labelled “International Bestseller”. Indeed the book did well both in Israel and France.

Read the full review here.

“A life in writing: Wu Ming” – The Guardian on the authors of Manituana

The Guardian’s Christopher Tayler writes about his visit to the Wu Ming collective in Bologna. In a piece entitled “A life in writing: Wu Ming”, Taylor discusses the group’s Luther Blissett years, Q, 54, and writing as a collective.

Manituana – which has just been published here, in a translation by Shaun Whiteside – is Wu Ming’s final novel written with Di Meo, who left the collective in 2008. Published in Italy two years ago, it’s concerned with the fortunes of the Iroquois groups who allied themselves with the British in the American war of independence, seeing the crown as a potential bulwark against the colonists’ territorial ambitions. As with all of their novels, it can also be read as a quizzical reflection on more recent history – in this case, the Bush administration’s inward-looking hyper-nationalism. “After the attack on Afghanistan,” Bui says, “and especially in the months before the second Gulf war, when there was a sharp difference of opinion about the ‘war on terror’ between the US and Europe, there was a journalistic metaphor: ‘The Atlantic ocean is widening.’ We started to reflect on that, and so we went back to the beginning of the relationship, when the US became the US – when it separated from Europe, in a way.”

The original idea was to write “alternative-reality fiction. We wanted to write a novel set in 1876, a century after the American revolution, but in an alternative reality where George Washington lost and the North American colonies are still part of the British empire.” “It was a great idea,” Guglielmi adds. “But we realised that the ‘what if?’ is inside the real history, the known history.” Bui takes up the thread: “The story of the American revolution is far more complex than the official mythological version, the myth of origins that’s told in movies such as The Patriot. If you take the point of view of black slaves on the plantations who enlisted in the British army because that was freedom for them, or of native Americans, the relationship between oppressors and oppressed is turned upside down. Shifting the point of view from the rebels to the native Americans was already an element of alternative reality, because it gave us the opportunity to tell the story in an unexpected way.”

Read the full article here.

Shlomo Sand’s SOAS Lecture Broadcast Tonight

Shlomo Sand’s 11th of November London lecture on his book Invention of the Jewish People will be broadcast tonight at 8pm on Resonance104.4fm. For more information, see Clearspot here.

Chantal Mouffe’s Books Interview for the New Statesman

Nina Power interviews Chantal Mouffe, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Westminster, for the New Statesman about, amongst other things, the public sphere and the financial crisis:

What I have in mind is not simply a space for the expression of any kind of disagreement, but a confrontation betweenconflicting notions about how to organise society. This does not exist in Britain at the moment, because no political party clearly challenges the hegemony of neoliberalism. There are, of course, disagreements about a variety of issues, but what is lacking is a debate about possible alternatives to the current neoliberal model of globalisation. We have been told by advocates of New Labour that politics now takes place at the centre and that the categories of right and left have become obsolete…

There was a moment at the beginning of the financial crisis when it seemed that the hegemony of neoliberalism had received a serious blow. After decades of being demonised, the state was suddenly called to the rescue. However, instead of implementing redistributive policies, the intervention of the state has been limited to rescuing the banks. There is, though, a positive aspect. I think there is an increasing awareness that the current model of development is unsustainable.

Read the full interview here.

Chantal Mouffe’s The Democratic Paradox is published in the latest set of Verso’s Radical Thinkers series. Her other books include Return of the Political in Set 2, and Hegemony & Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics with Ernesto Laclau.

The fourth set of the series will be launched on 26 November at Tate Britain by a panel discussion entitled DON’T LOOK BACK: RADICAL THINKERS AND THE ARTS SINCE 1909

On the 100th anniversary of the Futurism Manifesto, join critical thinkers TERRY EAGLETON, SIMON CRITCHLEY, KATE SOPER, EYAL WEIZMAN and CHAIR ALBERTO TOSCANO  in exploring a century of radical thinking and the arts – and debating what lies ahead. The recent Futurism exhibition at Tate Modern reminds us of an age when politics and aesthetics were densely interwoven in an explosive rejection of the past. This distinguished panel will assess the legacy of modernism to ask how today’s radical thinkers might understand the role of the arts at the dawn of the twenty first century and beyond.

Tate Britain Auditorium
£8 (£6 concessions)
For tickets book online here or call 020 7887 8888.

Nina Power is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University, author of One-Dimensional Woman and blogger. Venture into “the chaos of a still unrevealed nosography” at her blog infinite thought…

Shlomo Sand interviewed by Rana Mitter on BBC Night Waves

Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People, was interviewed by Rana Mitter on Night Waves, BBC Radio 3. Listen again here.

Stephen Sackur interviews Shlomo Sand for BBC HARDtalk

Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People, was interviewed by Stephen Sackur for BBC HARDtalk. Broadcast tonight at 23.30 on the BBC News Channel, Professor Sand discusses The Invention of the Jewish People and the controversy surrounding the English translation of his bestselling book.

More information here

The Sunday Times and The Financial Times review Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People

Simon Schama, for The Financial Times, and Max Hastings, for The Sunday Times, have both reviewed Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People. While both reviewers attack the book’s title -  with Hastings calling it ‘foolishly provocative’ and Schama ’splashy’ – both recognise the power of Sand’s seminal text.  Hastings states that the book ‘represents, at the very least, a formidable polemic against claims that Israel has a moral right to define itself as an explicitly and exclusively Jewish society, in which non-Jews, such as Palestino-Israelis, are culturally and politically marginalised.’

Sand’s fundamental thesis is that the Jewish people are joined by bonds of ­religion, not race or ancient nationhood. He deplores the explicitly racial basis of the Israeli state, in which the Arab minority are second-class citizens. “No Jew who lives today in a ­western democracy would tolerate the ­discrimination and exclusion experienced by the ­Palestino-Israelis… The state’s ethnocentric foundation remains an obstacle to [its liberal democratic] development.”

It is easy to see why Sand’s book has attracted fierce controversy. The legend of the ancient exile and modern return stands at the heart of Israel’s self-belief. It is no more surprising that its people enjoy supposing that Joshua’s trumpets blew down the walls of Jericho — at a time when, Sand says, Jericho was a small town with no walls — than that we cherish tales of King Alfred and his cakes.

The author rightly deplores the eagerness of fanatics to insist upon the historical truth of events convenient to modern politics, in defiance of evidence or probability.

Read Max Hastings’ review of The Invention of the Jewish People here and Simon Schama’s review here.