Shlomo Sand’s Invention of the Jewish People is Independent’s Book of the Week 27 November 2009

Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People has been chosen as The Independent’s Book of the Week.

Stephen Howe remarks that “Sand’s political purpose is (in my view) an admirable one, and many of his historical claims probably more right than wrong. But at least the mixed response this review will convey might help break away from the pattern of reactions the book is receiving: it has already been published in French and Hebrew. They are starkly divided between uncritical enthusiasm and total condemnation. The blogosphere has been buzzing with wild charges and vulgar abuse against Sand’s book – most repeatedly, predictably and depressingly, calling it anti-Semitic.”

Read the full article here

View The Invention of the Jewish People website here.

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Slavoj Žižek on resurrecting the Left for Reuters’ The Great Debate

Ahead of a talk at the London School of Economics, Slavoj Žižek told Reuters “Capitalism as we knew it cannot survive — it is the time for mobilization.” His latest book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce decrees “our message today should be: do not be afraid, join us, come back! You’ve had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it – time to get serious once again!”

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See more from The Great Debate here.

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Žižek sees ours as ‘Apocalyptic Times’

Listen to Slavoj Žižek’s lecture ‘Apocalyptic Times’ delivered at Birkbeck on Tuesday 24th November.

In his forthcoming book Living in the End Times, due to be published by Verso in 2010, Žižek continues his analysis of the end of the world at the hands of the ‘four riders of the apocalypse’ identified in his latest book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. He asks, if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it possible for Western society to face up to living through the end times?

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Slavoj Žižek’s lecture at the RSA – ‘Against Charity’

Slavoj Žižek‘s lecture at the RSA last night was entitled ‘Against Charity’, taking a closer look at philanthropic tendencies and neoliberalism to coincide with the launch of his latest book  First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. The full mp3 audio file will be available shortly on the RSA website here.

In the meantime, listen to Žižek’s response to the question ‘What is Philosophy?’ posed by the chair Nigel Warburton, philosopher and producer of the Philosophy Bites podcast series.

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Judith Butler signs open letter of protest to UC Berkeley

Judith Butler and many other members of University of California at Berkeley faculty signed an Open Letter From Concerned Members of the Faculty to Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau. The letter protested the use of unwarranted police violence against students at a demonstration, in some cases against “defenseless people who had already been pushed to the ground”:

“Instances of unprovoked police brutality would be appalling and objectionable anywhere, but we find it most painful for these events to have taken place on the UC Berkeley campus, given the important tradition of protecting free speech that you, Chancellor Birgeneau, have only very recently defended. Hence we regard with dismay and astonishment your euphemistic reference to these Friday’s violence: “a few members of our campus community may have found themselves in conflict with law enforcement officers.” There is no doubt that our students and colleagues did find themselves subject to unwarranted and illegal police brutality. It is therefore incumbent on the Chancellor of UC Berkeley to condemn such actions unequivocally and to make sure that such actions are subject to comprehensive review and disciplinary action…

We want to underscore how important it is for the campus for you to convene an investigation and to take administrative responsibility for protecting the safety of students as well as their rights of assembly and expression. Friday’s failure to do so is a most painful public display of how far UC Berkeley has strayed from its historical responsibility as a national and international institution pledged to rights of free speech and assembly and to the ideals of social justice. It is surely difficult enough to see our reputation as an excellent and affordable university jeopardized through budget cuts and fee hikes. Must we see as well the dissolution of the ideal of protecting free speech for students for whom the very future of their education is at stake?”

Butler has publicly spoken out against UC Berkeley before.

In Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Judith Butler explores the media’s portrayal of state violence, building on her work in Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence which critiques the use of violence that has emerged as a response to the experience of loss in post-9/11 America.

Listen to Butler, with Simon Critchley and Jacques Rancière, discuss the importance of critical theory to social movements today here. Marking the release of a new set of titles in the acclaimed Radical Thinkers series, as well as publication of their own key texts, three of Verso’s most respected and influential writers met on Friday 23 for the Philosophy Department Thursday Night Workshop Series at the New School in New York

Simon Critchley will be speaking on radical thinking and art at the London launch of set 4 of the Radical Thinkers project at  the Tate Britain on November 26th: DON’T LOOK BACK: RADICAL THINKERS AND THE ARTS SINCE 1909.

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The New Statesman reports on Slavoj Žižek on the Myth of Natural Balance

Slavoj Žižek’s sold out talk the Myth of Natural Balance at the ICA on Monday 23 November focussed on one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse examined in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce – the threat of ecological catastrophe. James Burgess reports for the New Statesman:

Žižek warned of the dangers of “naturalising” nature, positing the natural world as some utopia to which we can return inbalanced harmony. Nature, he says, is itself is not a balanced system, insofar as it is a set of contingent systems adapting to survive amidst various catastrophes and changing circumstances. That is not to say that we should disregard the dangers of climate change. On the contrary, despite the fact that the current global climate crisis has been caused by the structure of the particular economic system of one subset of one species, the crisis has the potential to affect the very basis of life on earth for the majority of species. Humans have become, for the first time, a geological force capable of changing the global temperatures that sustain life on Earth…

Žižek insists that we cannot look on the bright side of climate change for new opportunities to adapt. He argues that we must resist the normalisation of climate change, whereby what is first experienced as impossible and unthinkable becomes real and is accepted as part of every day life (for example, the re-emergence of the far right in mainstream politics, or the normalisation of torture in Guantanamo). In the case of the environment, damaging consequences of climate change have first been denied by governments and businesses, then accepted as part of business as usual…

As such, Žižek offers great insight to the those on the left who may feel dismayed at the co-opting of the environmental agenda by diverse conservative political (and corporate) forces. Žižek rightly identifies the global economic capitalist framework as responsible for both the financial and the climate crises, and poses a choice: we can put aside political differences to attempt to tackle impending climatic doom (with the inevitable resurgence of capitalist crisis under business as usual), or we can face the driving force of the crisis head on.

Read the full article here.

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Watch Slavoj Žižek on BBC News Hardtalk

Slavoj Žižek speaks about the ideas in his latest book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce with Stephen Sackur:

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Historical Materialism Annual Conference 2009, 27-29 November – ANOTHER WORLD IS NECESSARY: CRISIS, STRUGGLE AND POLITICAL ALTERNATIVES

ANOTHER WORLD IS NECESSARY: CRISIS, STRUGGLE AND POLITICAL ALTERNATIVES

 

The sixth annual Historical Materialism conference takes place next weekend, 27th to 29th November at SOAS and Birkbeck, London.

For the full programme, abstracts and other information click here. Pre-registration closes November 24 – book your tickets here.

 

Speakers include: Gilbert Achcar * Robert Albritton * Kevin Anderson * Jairus Banaji * Wendy Brown * Alex Callinicos * Vivek Chibber * Hester Eisenstein * Ben Fine * Ferruccio Gambino * Lindsey German * Peter Hallward* John Holloway * Fredric Jameson * Bob Jessop * David McNally * China Mieville * Kim Moody * Peter Osborne * Leo Panitch * Moishe Postone * Sheila Rowbotham * Shlomo Sand * Julian Stallabrass * Hillel Ticktin * Kees Van Der Pijl * Hilary Wainright

Panels include: APOCALYPSE MARXISM * ART AGAINST CAPITALISM * CLASS AND POLITICS IN THE ‘GLOBAL SOUTH’ * COGNITIVE MAPPING, TOTALITY AND THE REALIST TURN * COMMODIFYING HEALTH CARE IN THE UK * CUBAN REVOLUTION AND CUBAN SOCIETY * DERIVATIVES * DIMENSIONS OF THE FOOD CRISIS * ECOLOGICAL CRISIS * EMPIRE AND IMPERIALISM * ENERGY, WASTE AND CAPITALISM * FINANCE, THE HOUSING QUESTION AND URBAN POLITICS * GLOBAL LAW AND HUMAN RIGHTS * GRAMSCI RELOADED * INTERPRETATIONS OF THE CRISIS * LABOUR BEYOND THE FACTORY * LATIN AMERICAN WORKING CLASSES * LINEAGES OF NEOLIBERALISM * MARXISM AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE * MIGRATION * PHILOSOPHY AND COMMUNISM IN THE EARLY MARX * POSTNEOLIBERALISM * RACE, NATION AND ORIENTALISM * RED PLANETS: MARXISM AND SCIENCE FICTION * REMEMBERING PETER GOWAN AND CHRIS HARMAN * REVOLUTIONARY THEORY, AUTONOMIST MARXISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY * SLAVERY AND CAPITALISM IN THE US SOUTH * STUDENT MOVEMENTS AND YOUTH REVOLTS * THE CRITIQUE OF RELIGION AND THE CRITIQUE OF CAPITALISM * UTOPIAS, DYSTOPIAS AND SOCIALIST BIOPOLITICS.

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The New York Times review of Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People – and extra London date

Shlomo Sand‘s The Invention of the Jewish People is reviewed by Patricia Cohen for the New York Times. Cohen notes the controversy the book has caused and offers her own mixed opinions:

Despite the fragmented and incomplete historical record, experts pretty much agree that some popular beliefs about Jewish history simply don’t hold up: there was no sudden expulsion of all Jews from Jerusalem in A.D. 70, for instance. What’s more, modern Jews owe their ancestry as much to converts from the first millennium and early Middle Ages as to the Jews of antiquity…

But while these ideas are commonplace among historians, they still manage to provoke controversy each time they surface in public, beyond the scholarly world. The latest example is the book “The Invention of the Jewish People,” which spent months on the best-seller list in Israel and is now available in English. Mixing respected scholarship with dubious theories, the author, Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University, frames the narrative as a startling exposure of suppressed historical facts. The translated version of his polemic has sparked a new wave of coverage in Britain and has provoked spirited debates online and in seminar rooms.

Professor Sand, a scholar of modern France, not Jewish history, candidly states his aim is to undercut the Jews’ claims to the land of Israel by demonstrating that they do not constitute “a people,” with a shared racial or biological past. The book has been extravagantly denounced and praised, often on the basis of whether or not the reader agrees with his politics.

The vehement response to these familiar arguments — both the reasonable and the outrageous — highlights the challenge of disentangling historical fact from the sticky web of religious and political myth and memory…”

Read the full article here.

On Sunday 29 November, Shlomo Sand will return to London to speak at Historical Materialism Annual Conference 2009 Another World is Necessary: Crisis, Struggle and Political Alternatives, 27-29 November at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies, University of London. Shlomo Sand will be debating with John Rose and Robert Fine:  A DEBATE ON ZIONISM, ANTISEMITISM AND THE LEFT.

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Eric Hobsbawm has Shlomo Sand’s Invention of the Jewish People as one of his ‘books of the year’ in the Observer

In yesterday’s Observer, historian Eric Hobsbawm selects Shlomo Sand’s Invention of the Jewish People as one of his books of the year:

Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso) is both a welcome and, in the case of Israel, much needed exercise in the dismantling of nationalist historical myth and a plea for an Israel that belongs equally to all its inhabitants. Perhaps books combining passion and erudition don’t change political situations, but if they did, this one would count as a landmark.

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