Avi Shlaim's Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations is published by Verso. Ari Shavit's book My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, The Idea of Israel and My Promised Land is published by Spiegel & Grau

The separation wall on the West Bank that divides Palestinians and Israelis. Photograph: Pedro Ugarte/AFP/Getty

Avi Shlaim's Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations is published by Verso.
Ari Shavit's book My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, The Idea of Israel and My Promised Land is published by Spiegel & Grau

The moral consequences of the triumph of Zionism: Ilan Pappé and Ari Shavit view Israel from different vantage points, but they agree the status quo between Israel and the Palestinians can't be sustained

Zionism achieved its greatest triumph with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. The Zionist idea and its principal political progeny are the subject of deeply divergent interpretations, not least inside the Jewish state itself. No other aspect of Zionism, however, is more controversial than its attitude towards the indigenous population of the land of its dreams. Chaim Weizmann, the first president of the state of Israel, famously said that it is by its treatment of the Palestinians that his country will be judged. Yet, when judged by this criterion, Zionism is not just an unqualified failure but a tragedy of historic proportions. Zionism did achieve its central goal but at a terrible price: the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinians – what the Arabs call theNakba, the catastrophe.

The authors of these two books are both Israelis, but they approach their subject from radically different ideological vantage points. Ilan Pappé is a scholar and a pro-Palestinian political activist. He is one of the most prominent Israeli political dissidents living in exile, having moved from the University of Haifa to the University of Exeter. He is also one of the few Israeli students of the conflict who write about the Palestinian side with real knowledge and empathy.

Pappé places Zionism under an uncompromising lens. In his reading it was not a national liberation movement but a settler colonial project imposed on the Palestinians by force with the support of the west. From this premise it follows that the state of Israel is not legitimate even in its original borders, much less so within its post-1967 borders. To correct the injustice, Pappé advocates a peaceful, humanist and socialist alternative to the Zionist idea in the form of a binational state with equal rights for all its citizens.

Ari Shavit is a member of the editorial board of the liberal Zionist paper Ha'aretz, and one of Israel's most influential columnists. He is an eloquent exponent of liberal Zionism, but he also exemplifies its ambiguities, inner contradictions and moral myopia.

Pappé has published a large number of books on the history of Arab-Israeli conflict of which the most widely read and most controversial is The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. The Idea of Israel is not a history book but a close study of the role of Zionist ideology in the making of modern Israel and of the continuing relevance of this ideology today in politics, the education system, the media, the cinema and Ashkenazi-Sephardi relations. The book thus offers a broad survey of the main critical schools of thought on Israel. Two chapters deal directly with the Palestine question: the historiography of the first Arab-Israeli war, and the uses and misuses of the Holocaust.


History is usually written by the victors, and the Middle East is no exception. Pappé himself is a leading member of the group of "new" or revisionist Israeli historians that emerged in the late 1980s and included Simha Flapan, Benny Morris and myself. In our different ways we all challenged the dominant narrative, the narrative of the victors. Using recently released documents we debunked many of the myths that had come to surround the birth of the state of Israel and the 1948 war. Intentionally or otherwise, our work thus lent credibility to the Palestinian historical narrative about the war for Palestine.

In his new book, Pappé deals with recent developments in the historiographical sphere, especially on the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem. The big question has always been: did they leave of their own accord or were they forced out? Israeli governments have always denied that they drove the Palestinians out. In his ground-breaking 1989 book on the subject – The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 – Morris presented incontrovertible evidence of Israeli involvement in creating the refugee problem. Evidence subsequently gathered by Morris points to an even higher degree of Israeli responsibility. But following the outbreak of the second intifada, Morris veered to the right and radically changed his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He concluded it was a mistake not to expel all the Palestinians from the Jewish state in 1948. Pappé argues that the new documents prove that the expulsion of 730,000 Palestinians was more premeditated, systematic and extensive than Morris had ever acknowledged. In short, he claims that when war provided an opportunity, the Zionist idea was translated into the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The role of the Holocaust in empowering the struggle for Jewish statehood is another sensitive issue in the debate about the past. Pappé denounces any political manipulation of the Holocaust as a means of moral blackmail designed to silence legitimate criticism of Israeli policies. His sharpest comments are reserved for Israeli officials who have perfected such manipulation as a diplomatic tool in their struggle against the Palestinians. His deeper concern, however, is to understand the impact and significance of the Holocaust memory in constructing and marketing the idea of Israel. Israelis have harboured an exaggerated sense of themselves as victims, and this self-image, he argues, has prevented them from seeing the Palestinians in a more realistic light, and impeded a reasonable political solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The argument that what happened to the Palestinians was just a small injustice to rectify a greater injustice (the destruction of European Jewry) is rejected with some vehemence. The only hope Pappé sees of making peace with the Arabs is for Israelis to free themselves of their Shoah mentality.

Shavit's position is more conflicted and therefore more opaque. He is a passionate but not uncritical Zionist. His book is also not a history of Israel but a series of stories of individuals and significant events that shed a great deal of new light on the making of the Jewish state. Among the cast of characters on whom Shavit draws to construct his picture of Israel are Holocaust survivors; a youth leader who helped to turn Masada into a symbol and shrine of post-Holocaust Zionism; an enigmatic engineer who was instrumental in building the atomic bomb in Dimona to defend the Jews against the threat of a second genocide; the zealous religious Zionists who spearheaded the settler movement; leftwing academics in Jerusalem; and pedlars of sex and drugs in Tel Aviv nightclubs. But, above all, this is a personal story. As the author explains in the introduction: "This book is the personal odyssey of one Israeli who is bewildered by the historic drama engulfing his homeland. It is the journey in space and time of an Israeli-born individual exploring the wider narrative of his nation."

The most vivid illustration of Shavit's attitude to this wider narrative is his account of the expulsion by the nascent Israeli army of 50,000-70,000 of the Arab residents of Lydda and the massacre of 70 civilians in a small mosque in July 1948. The grisly story has been told many times before, but Shavit's reconstruction is riveting. His original contribution consists of interviews with the Jewish brigade commander and the military governor in which they speak frankly about their strategic and moral dilemmas. Shavit refers to this episode as "our black box" in which lies "the dark secret of Zionism". But he goes on to say that the conquest of Lydda and the expulsion of its inhabitants "were an inevitable phase of the Zionist revolution that laid the foundation for the Zionist state". "Lydda," he asserts, "is an integral and essential part of our story." Like Morris, Shavit evidently thinks that the end justifies the means; I don't. The massacre of innocent civilians can never be justified under any circumstances. It is a heinous war crime and it must be denounced as such even if the perpetrators are Jews and, yes, even if they are Holocaust survivors.

Both authors engage with the essence of Zionism as well as with its more problematic parts. While Pappé represents the cutting edge of radical anti-Zionism, Shavit exposes the dissonance, the double standards and intellectual incoherence of liberal Zionism. Shavit, by his own acronym, is a Wasp – a White Ashkenazi Supporter of Peace. His liberal credentials were burnished by serving as chair of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel in the early 1990s. In addition, he enjoys the great advantage of writing like an angel. The smoothness and beauty of his prose is all the more remarkable given that English is his second language. But the brilliance of Shavit's style tends to conceal the ethnocentric character of his commentary and his inability to confront the moral consequences of the triumph of Zionism.

On one thing the two authors agree: the current status quo between Israel and the Palestinians is unsustainable. Both of them see the writing on the wall. The occupation, the relentless expansion of illegal settlements, the construction of the monstrous "security barrier" on the West Bank, the demolition of Palestinian houses in East Jerusalem, the flagrant violations of international law, the systematic abuse of Palestinian human rights and the rampant racism – all are slowly but surely turning Israel into an international pariah. No sane Israeli relishes the prospect of living in a pariah state that maintains an apartheid regime. But few Israelis are ready for a truly honest historical reckoning with the people they have wronged and oppressed and whose land they continue to colonise. To blame the victims for their own misfortunes, as the people in power habitually do, is both disingenuous and despicable. This is no way for any nation to behave, especially one with such an acute historical memory of the bitter taste of victimhood.

•

Seven Steps to a Comprehensive Literature Review: A Multimodal and Cultural Approach. Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie and Rebecca Frels. Sage. 2016.

Seven Steps to a Comprehensive Literature Review: A Multimodal and Cultural Approach. Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie and Rebecca Frels. Sage. 2016.

In Seven Steps to a Comprehensive Literature Review: A Multimodal and Cultural Approach, Anthony J. Onwuegbuzieand Rebecca Frels offer a new guide on how to produce a comprehensive literature review through seven key steps that incorporate rigour, validity and reliability. Ana Raquel Nunes recommends this helpful, well-informed and well-organised book to those undertaking literature reviews as well as those reflecting on research methodologies more broadly.

Seven Steps to a Comprehensive Literature Review: A Multimodal and CulturalApproach, by Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie and Rebecca Frels, offers a straightforward guide on how to conduct literature reviews, and is the successor to Onwuegbuzie’s numerous previous works on qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods research. The book is a source of in-depth understanding of the role that literature reviews play within the research process and its practices, and is a substantive contribution to social, behavioural and health sciences research. It aims at incorporating rigour, validity and reliability when conducting literature reviews and presents seven steps on how to achieve this.

According to the authors, literature reviews should be systematic, defined ‘as a set of rigorous routines, documentation of such routines, and the way the literature reviewer negotiates particular biases throughout these routines’ (10). The authors acknowledge that this definition differs from the definitions of systematic literature reviews used in the health sciences. Instead, this book defines a comprehensive literature review (CLR) as an integrative review, being the combination of narrative review (i.e. theoretical, historical, general and methodological reviews) and systematic review (i.e. meta-analysis, meta-summary, rapid review and meta-synthesis).

Seven Steps to a Comprehensive Literature Review purposefully addresses CLR as ‘a methodological, culturally progressive approach involving the practice of documenting the process of inquiry into the current state of knowledge about a selected topic’ (18). Additionally, the authors’ approach to the CLR takes into account the researcher’s philosophical stance, research methods and practices which, when combined, create a framework for collecting, analysing and evaluating the information that will form the basis for conducting a literature review. The book thus presents five types of information – MODES: namely, Media; Observation(s); Documents; Experts(s); and Secondary Sources – that help the researcher in their journey through the literature review landscape, which in the end will produce either a separate output or inform primary research within a bigger research project.
Image Credit: (Ines Hegedus-Garcia CC BY 2.0)

Seven Steps to a Comprehensive Literature Review is an effective tool for an iterative process denoting a structured and chronological approach to conducting literature reviews. The book covers a range of research topics and practical examples arising from the authors’ own research including education, counselling and health systems research. Through these, the authors report an in-depth model characterised by a series of qualitative, quantitative and mixed research approaches, methods and techniques used to collect, analyse and evaluate data/information for the creation of new knowledge.

As its title suggests, the book is organised around seven sequential steps within three phases: the Exploration Phase includes Steps 1-5 (Exploring Beliefs and Topics; Initiating the Search; Storing and Organising Information; Selecting/Deselecting Information; and Expanding the Search (MODES)); the Interpretation Phase includes Step 6 (Analysing and Synthesising Information); and the Communication Phase includes Step 7 (Presenting the CLR Report). As the argument of the book develops, the differences between traditional literature reviews and the CLR become evident as the seven steps are unveiled. Traditional literature reviews are encapsulated within Steps 1-4, whilst a CLR goes further through the addition of Steps 5-7.

One of the steps that was of particular interest to me was Step 6 on analysing and synthesising information. The book advances research methodology knowledge and practice on the different elements of empirical data and how both qualitative and quantitative information can be analysed and synthesised to inform a CLR. In Step 6, the authors go to great lengths to explain and exemplify how users can perform qualitative and quantitative data analyses of information, as well as the level of integration that can be achieved when doing mixed methods analyses. Additionally, the authors explore the nature of data analysis and identify three levels or layers that need to be taken into consideration: namely, the research approach (e.g. grounded theory); the research method (e.g. measures if regression); and the research technique (e.g. content analysis) used. This is found to be essential as data analysis is considered to be a product of the research method used, which in turn is linked to the research approach.

Seven Steps to a Comprehensive Literature Review is not merely intended for those conducting a literature review, but it also works as a research methodology book as it addresses an extensive number of research methodologies, methods and techniques. The book offers a theoretically and practically informed discussion of increased integration of research processes, practices and products, raising important quality standards assurances necessary for a CLR, but also for research more generally. This is a very well-organised book which cleverly and effectively uses tables, figures and boxes throughout to illustrate and help contextualise detailed examples of the different steps involved in conducting a literature review.

Accordingly, readers seeking a tool or a guide on conducting literature reviews will find this a very helpful book. It will also be of use to a broader readership interested in research methodology more generally as it encompasses the different research traditions (qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods) as well as the stages of the research process (the research problem, the literature review, research design, data collection, data analysis and interpretation and report writing). For the reasons above, it will appeal widely to students, academics and practitioners interested in conducting literature reviews within the social, behavioural and health sciences. It is suitable for different levels of experience in conducting literature reviews and doing research in general. Furthermore, this is a book that should be at-hand and used as a guide each time one decides to conduct a piece of research that includes a literature review as it will provide new ideas and directions depending on the topic and disciplinary perspective.

Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s. Anne Sebba. Weidenfeld and Nicolson

Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s. Anne Sebba. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 2016. 

What did it feel like to be a woman in Paris from 1939-49? What were the choices women were forced to make in order to ensure their survival during the Nazi occupation? Anne Sebba attempts to answer these questions, and many more, in Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s, using an impressive array of primary sources including interviews with surviving women. The book chronicles how women from all walks of life coped during years of fear and uncertainty, and gives readers insight into the life-and-death daily decisions that women in Paris made. I  recommend this book to those interested in social history, gender and femininity studies.




Anne Sebba, former foreign correspondent for Reuters and author of such books asJennie Churchill: Winston’s American Mother and That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, gives us the first in-depth study of the everyday lives of women and girls in war-torn Paris. Although politics lie at the heart of Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s, the author offers the reader unique insight into Parisian culture and weaves together a rich tapestry of personal accounts detailing how women strove to maintain their identity during the Nazi occupation. Les Parisiennes examines both collaborator and resister accounts, demonstrating that during times of war, personal choices are not black-and-white affairs.

In the prologue, the author describes meeting Annette Krajcer in 2015, one of the few survivors of the notorious French round-ups of Jews. Annette and her sister were imprisoned in Drancy alongside 13,000 people, 4,000 of whom were children. It was only by chance that a family member secured the girls’ release, narrowly sparing them from being transported to Auschwitz. Similarly, whilst Séverine Darcque was not born until long after the end of the Second World War, she owes her life to Pierrette Pauchard, who helped to hide Séverine’s future grandmother from the round-ups.

Such personal accounts show the important legacy of women’s stories and their experiences during Les Années Noires (‘The Dark Years’). The diverse narratives coming out of this period help to demonstrate that the past is not necessarily the past in France today, argues the author; it wasn’t until 1995 that President Jacques Chirac acknowledged the Vichy government’s collaboration with Nazi Germany and its subsequent willingness to deport French Jews to extermination camps to the east.

Les Parisiennes makes use of the many personal accounts of women during the years of occupation, but not without difficulty: women were often forced to make complex choices during this period, some of which many and their families find difficult to explain or justify today. Consequently, some interviews were hard to secure. However, the author also makes use of women’s diaries, letters and memoirs, both published and unpublished.

Throughout Les Parisiennes the author describes how women used their femininity and fashion as a weapon of resistance against the Germans, whether by wearing lipstick during times of rationing or continuing to shop at exclusive boutiques until their inevitable closure. For the purpose of this relatively short review, I will concentrate primarily on the years 1943-44, whereby women had joined resistance movements in droves against their Nazi oppressors but, as shall be discussed, did not necessarily receive a hero’s welcome after liberation.

Image Credit: Everyday Life in Liberated Paris, France, 1945 (Ministry of Information Photo Division Photographer, Wikipedia Public Domain)

Whilst the war offered women more freedom in terms of employment opportunities, their personal freedoms were still largely controlled by the fascist state who were attempting to follow Nazi Germany’s Kinder, Küche, Kirche (‘Children, Kitchen, Church’) doctrine. In ‘1943: Paris Trembles’, the author describes how on 30 July 1943 a woman named Marie-Louise Giraud was guillotined by the Vichy administration for the ‘crime’ of performing abortions. Marie-Louise holds the dubious accolade of being the only person in French history to be executed for such a reason. However, abortions were available to the rich for around 4,000 francs, but not always performed in the best interests of women: Arlette Scali described how her husband ‘did not want children […] when I was pregnant, my mother-in-law paid for abortions which were illegal and costly. It was horrible.’ Women who attempted to take control over their own lives and bodies in times of increasing uncertainty were antithetical to the administration’s attempt to fall in line with the ideology of their German occupiers, yet women’s bodies could be consumed by those rich enough to afford it as the Vichy government had legalised prostitution. Giraud was a victim of a regime that was rapidly falling out of touch with French society at large, argues the author, and represents the culture of denunciation that prevailed during occupation, of which there were around 3.5 million in France during the war.

Despite this, many ordinary Parisians had become tired of witnessing cruelty and barbarity on a daily basis and joined resistance groups. As Jacqueline d’Alincourt describes: ‘should one resign oneself to bow one’s head in submission? I knew that I would rather die.’ Jacqueline was eventually sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp for her role in resistance activities, but like so many other women, she was determined to do something, whether to join the UK’s SOE (Special Operations Executive) like Marie-France Geoffroy-Deshaume, or to help on escape lines like Denise Dufournier, whose worldview was summed up by her daughter: ‘you either did something or you were a collaborator.’ Denise was also sent to Ravensbrück. (The camp experiences of d’Alincourt, Dufournier, Genevieve de Gaulle, Germaine Tillion and other French resisters are detailed in If This is a Woman: Inside Ravensbrück: Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women by Sarah Helm.)
On 6 June 1944, Operation Overlord began, putting in motion a series of events that would lead to the liberation of Paris in the August. In ‘1944: Paris Shorn’, the author describes how, in the euphoria of liberation, many women were accused ofcollaboration horizontale with the Germans. This implied that French women had sexual relations with the occupying forces, but women who had performed professional services for the Germans, such as cooking and cleaning, were also targeted by zealous mobs who beat them up and shaved off their hair. Women who were accused of ‘infidelity to the nation’ could even have swastikas drawn or branded onto their naked bodies before being paraded through the streets.

General de Gaulle did not punish the male political and commercial elite who had backed Pétain; such men were considered useful allies against the alleged communist threat. This was, of course, an extremely misogynistic response to the alleged role of French women during occupation; the fact that many remarkable women had risked their lives to help the Allies secure victory over the Nazis was conveniently forgotten in the post-war melee. However, if French society at large would not recognise the contribution of women resistance fighters, they had to do it themselves: Irène Delmas organised the first conference of resistance women in 1944 and over 350 attended. Yet, to date only six women have ever been awarded medals for their role in securing France’s victory.
Les Parisiennes is a fascinating exploration of the everyday lives of French women during the war years, encompassing the personal accounts and experiences of many diverse figures such as designer Coco Chanel, novelist Irène Némirovsky, Nazi collaborator and racing driver Violette Morris and resistance fighters such as Cécile Rol-Tanguy, de Gaulle and Tillion, among countless others. Many women found ways to resist the German occupiers, and whilst their efforts were dismissed as inconsequential after liberation, we now know that they were essential to securing peace not only for France, but also for the whole of Europe.

The Land Is Full: Addressing Overpopulation in Israel Hardcover,by Alon Tal, Yale University Press

 
The Land Is Full: Addressing Overpopulation in Israel Hardcover,by Alon Tal, Yale University Press

An Israeli academic claims the country faces problems if it keeps having too many children.

Tel Aviv beach

Two kinds of countries are emerging in the world, claims Prof. Alon Tal.“There will be lands where timid, myopic, or misguided leaders took a path of least resistance and let demographic inertia continue unrestrained,” he writes. In those places, people will become poor and food will prove scarce. In other places, he claims, “cultural evolution will combine to produce the regulation and self-restraint required for stabilizing population.”


“The fate of civilization may even hang on Israel’s population situation, which, if left unchanged, likely will play an expanding negative role in that nation’s behavior,” write Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, in a foreword to The Land is Full: Addressing Overpopulation in Israel.

The book, written by Tal, who founded the Israel Union for Environmental Defense and the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, argues that Orthodox Jews and Arabs should reduce family size, and the country must plan for the future by having fewer children. He admits that “it is especially difficult to talk about strategies for limiting the number of Jews,” but nevertheless “our thinking must change.”

What follows is a litany of claims that assert how overpopulation is a doomsday scenario for Israel.

Tal notes that Israel is “unique among Western countries” in that 73 percent of Israeli women between 45 and 50 have two or more children. By contrast, the rate in Germany is only 51 percent. Israel is “one of the most crowded nations on the planet,” he writes, adding that it is “1,000 percent more congested on average than other countries in the OECD.”

Tal notes that there are 7,522 people per square kilometer in the area around Tel Aviv. Rapid demographic growth creates poverty; there are crowded classrooms, crowded hospitals and crowded highways, the book claims. But Tal still brings some hope. He notes that many Arab families have reduced family size, in line with the Muslim world in general.

“Phenomenal drops to replacement or below-replacement fertility levels were reported in Tunisia, Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon,” he notes. Saudis are having fewer children than Jewish women in Israel, and Israel has nine times the population density of the kingdom.

Tal claims people are deterred from addressing demography by “the very virulence of attacks against anyone who challenges such a central principle in the country’s code of ethics.”

Those who critique Beduin birthrates, he says, are said to have racist motives, and those who say Jews should have fewer children are accused of being “anti-Zionist.”

He asserts that the sense of “social justice” among “privileged, liberal intellectuals” makes them fear criticizing haredim and Beduin who have large families.

Not to mention the constant presence of the Holocaust.

“Some of the world’s leading Jewish environmentalists feel that the normal rules of demographic restraint should be suspended in the case of the Jewish people,” Tal writes, “at the very least until pre-World War II numbers are restored.”

But Tal’s perspective is heavily jaundiced by his own stereotypes about Israel.

He describes the arrival of Soviet Jewry as a “human tsunami”; Moroccan Jews, the author concludes, were “less able to contribute economically to Israel”; and he claims that “Israel’s Ethiopians are unable to change their skin color and blend in like immigrants from earlier waves.”

One almost gets the feeling reading this book that if only Jews had all been non-Russian, white Europeans from Germany, then it would have been better to have millions of them. Perhaps it’s not demographics that is the problem, but not having enough white Europeans in Israel? This book is a classic example of how someone can have all the correct data and draw the wrong conclusions. Tal is correct that overpopulation harms the environment.

He is correct in discussing how crowded classrooms result in “frustration and disillusionment” among teachers.

There is a link between poverty and family size among Beduin and haredim.

But the conclusion that Israel is in for a demographic doomsday is misguided.

Germany, the supposed model of demographic success, needs migrants because of low fertility. In 2015, when 1.1 million mostly Middle Eastern migrants arrived in Germany, The Los Angeles Times noted that “the nation’s population is shrinking at an alarming rate and it desperately needs” newcomers. The Financial Times wrote that the “country’s aging population is threatening its position as Europe’s largest economy.”

Tal claims Israel needs “enlightened public policies” to keep up with the “intoxicating influence” of Western civilization’s progressive birthrates. But every country that has become wealthy and Western, from Japan to Italy, now needs millions of fertile immigrants from the Middle East to “save” them from demographic decline.

Not only should Israel not go down the path of Germany, but one solution that’s already taken place is the number of Israelis who have emigrated to the US and EU, and will undoubtedly continue to do so. This will relieve population pressures naturally, as in other countries with high population densities. And why does Israel need a “strategy for limiting the number of Jews,” when Jews are a tiny minority in the world? Let the billions of people in India and China have lower birthrates, Jews can have high birth rates and emigrate.

Israel is not the most crowded country – it is 32nd behind South Korea, Lebanon, Barbados, Bangladesh and many others, including the economically successful Netherlands. Tel Aviv is also not the densest city in the world – Manila (41,000 per square km.), Taipei and Seoul are far more crowded. Tel Aviv isn’t even in the top 40 cities by population density. Israel as a whole closely resembles the US northeast’s megalopolis between Boston and Washington, where density is 360 people per square kilometer.

Israel is perfectly positioned to be similar to Singapore or the UAE. What it needs is a more dynamic economy and solutions to its housing crises. That doesn’t mean fewer people, it means better policies to plan for them all and to open up the Negev to real development. The land is not full, the land has simply been mismanaged. likely will play an expanding negative role in that nation’s behavior,” write Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, in a foreword to The Land is Full: Addressing Overpopulation in Israel.

The book, written by Tal, who founded the Israel Union for Environmental Defense and the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, argues that Orthodox Jews and Arabs should reduce family size, and the country must plan for the future by having fewer children. He admits that “it is especially difficult to talk about strategies for limiting the number of Jews,” but nevertheless “our thinking must change.”

What follows is a litany of claims that assert how overpopulation is a doomsday scenario for Israel.

Tal notes that Israel is “unique among Western countries” in that 73 percent of Israeli women between 45 and 50 have two or more children. By contrast, the rate in Germany is only 51 percent. Israel is “one of the most crowded nations on the planet,” he writes, adding that it is “1,000 percent more congested on average than other countries in the OECD.”

Tal notes that there are 7,522 people per square kilometer in the area around Tel Aviv. Rapid demographic growth creates poverty; there are crowded classrooms, crowded hospitals and crowded highways, the book claims. But Tal still brings some hope. He notes that many Arab families have reduced family size, in line with the Muslim world in general.

“Phenomenal drops to replacement or below-replacement fertility levels were reported in Tunisia, Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon,” he notes. Saudis are having fewer children than Jewish women in Israel, and Israel has nine times the population density of the kingdom.

Tal claims people are deterred from addressing demography by “the very virulence of attacks against anyone who challenges such a central principle in the country’s code of ethics.”

Those who critique Beduin birthrates, he says, are said to have racist motives, and those who say Jews should have fewer children are accused of being “anti-Zionist.”

He asserts that the sense of “social justice” among “privileged, liberal intellectuals” makes them fear criticizing haredim and Beduin who have large families.

Not to mention the constant presence of the Holocaust.

“Some of the world’s leading Jewish environmentalists feel that the normal rules of demographic restraint should be suspended in the case of the Jewish people,” Tal writes, “at the very least until pre-World War II numbers are restored.”

But Tal’s perspective is heavily jaundiced by his own stereotypes about Israel.

He describes the arrival of Soviet Jewry as a “human tsunami”; Moroccan Jews, the author concludes, were “less able to contribute economically to Israel”; and he claims that “Israel’s Ethiopians are unable to change their skin color and blend in like immigrants from earlier waves.”

One almost gets the feeling reading this book that if only Jews had all been non-Russian, white Europeans from Germany, then it would have been better to have millions of them. Perhaps it’s not demographics that is the problem, but not having enough white Europeans in Israel? This book is a classic example of how someone can have all the correct data and draw the wrong conclusions. Tal is correct that overpopulation harms the environment.

He is correct in discussing how crowded classrooms result in “frustration and disillusionment” among teachers.

There is a link between poverty and family size among Beduin and haredim.

But the conclusion that Israel is in for a demographic doomsday is misguided.

Germany, the supposed model of demographic success, needs migrants because of low fertility. In 2015, when 1.1 million mostly Middle Eastern migrants arrived in Germany, The Los Angeles Times noted that “the nation’s population is shrinking at an alarming rate and it desperately needs” newcomers. The Financial Times wrote that the “country’s aging population is threatening its position as Europe’s largest conomy.”

Tal claims Israel needs “enlightened public policies” to keep up with the “intoxicating influence” of Western civilization’s progressive birthrates. But every country that has become wealthy and Western, from Japan to Italy, now needs millions of fertile immigrants from the Middle East to “save” them from demographic decline.

Not only should Israel not go down the path of Germany, but one solution that’s already taken place is the number of Israelis who have emigrated to the US and EU, and will undoubtedly continue to do so. This will relieve population pressures naturally, as in other countries with high population densities. And why does Israel need a “strategy for limiting the number of Jews,” when Jews are a tiny minority in the world? Let the billions of people in India and China have lower birthrates, Jews can have high birth rates and emigrate.

Israel is not the most crowded country – it is 32nd behind South Korea, Lebanon, Barbados, Bangladesh and many others, including the economically successful Netherlands. Tel Aviv is also not the densest city in the world – Manila (41,000 per square km.), Taipei and Seoul are far more crowded. Tel Aviv isn’t even in the top 40 cities by population density. Israel as a whole closely resembles the US northeast’s megalopolis between Boston and Washington, where density is 360 people per square kilometer.

Israel is perfectly positioned to be similar to Singapore or the UAE. What it needs is a more dynamic economy and solutions to its housing crises. That doesn’t mean fewer people, it means better policies to plan for them all and to open up the Negev to real development. The land is not full, the land has simply been mismanaged.

Jacob Neusner:An American Jewish Iconoclast byAaron W. Hughes NYU Press

Jacob Neusner:An American Jewish Iconoclast byAaron W. Hughes NYU Press 336 pages




There are at least two ways to write a biography of an individual The New York Times called the most-published person in human history. In a little over half a century, Jacob Neusner published more than a thousand scholarly and popular books and countless essays, op-eds, and public and private letters, and was part of almost every significant American Jewish controversy since World War II. The first way to write the biography of such a person would be to write a multivolume 1,000-page tome plodding through each work, each period, each controversy, each accomplishment. The second would be a concise 300-page book that adeptly touches on the most important dimensions and contributions of this paradoxical intellectual figure (who remains the only person to be appointed to both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Council on the Humanities), and to simultaneously honestly engage with, but not get mired in, the many controversies that he compulsively generated. To write such a biography the author would need to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff and how not to get seduced by the lure of tabloid scholarship. Thankfully, Aaron Hughes, the author of an extensive study of Neusner’s scholarly work on religion titled Jacob Neusner on Religion: The Example of Judaism, chose the second option in his Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast (NYU Press), which navigates through the often-turbulent waters of a complicated, colorful, and in many ways unappreciated, intellectual life.

The sad irony about Jacob Neusner is that he is arguably one of the most influential voices in American Jewish intellectual life in the past half-century—yet outside of the academy, and more specifically outside the academic study of Judaism, while many people know his name, few are actually familiar with his work. He is perhaps most widely known for his irascible, sometimes quite nasty, and often pugnacious personality, his famous excoriating reviews, sometimes book-length critiques, and his fallings-out with almost every institution he worked in, almost every teacher who taught him, many of his students—as well as the errors that scar his many translations and publications. He sued institutions he worked for and individuals who attacked his work. And yet, as Hughes shows, the importance of his contribution should not be underestimated.

There is a joke that in 200 years when scholars study Neusner they will think Neusner was a “school” and not a person. No one would imagine one individual could have produced that much work in such disparate areas, from late antique Judaism to the Holocaust, Zionism, Jewish-Christian relations, higher education, the humanities, and American politics (just to name a few). Hughes notes in his conclusion that Neusner may be “the most important American-born Jewish thinker this country has produced.” It is a huge claim, for sure, and therefore contestable, but upon reflection, it is actually quite reasonable.

***

Jacob Neusner was born July 28, 1932, in West Hartford Connecticut. The Neusner family was characteristically assimilated, had no direct connection to family in Europe and thus no direct familial connection to the Holocaust. His was a quintessentially American Jewish family in a small American city. His father was in the newspaper business and Neusner quickly learned the power and influence of words, writing for his father’s local newspapers when he was barely a teenager. Writing, and writing quickly, would become his trademark.

Neusner’s reputation as a difficult person began quite young. Hughes notes that a comment on his third-grade report card read as follows: “He prefers not to do as the others are doing, which causes many difficulties.” This assessment would follow him through his entire adult life and, in some way, may be the very source of some of his greatest accomplishments.

Neusner had no formal Jewish education, and by the time he reached late adolescence he could not read Hebrew. He first really encountered Judaism when he met Professor Harry Wolfson his first year as a Harvard undergraduate. Wolfson was committed to studying Judaism within the broader category of religious philosophy, an idea that Neusner would adopt in a different form later on. But Wolfson was an Old World Jew with a heavy Yiddish accent who, while respected, never fully integrated into the culture at Harvard. And he was of the view, common at that time, that if you were not reared within the walls of the Jewish study house (i.e. a yeshiva), you could never seriously contribute to the academic study of Judaism. Thus Wolfson, even as he acknowledged the talent of this young conscientious assimilated Jew, discouraged Neusner from the pursuit of an academic career in Judaism. But as his third-grade teacher noted, Neusner rarely did as others told him.

While being reared in a traditional education gives one the linguistic and even cultural tools to read texts in their original, and often know them intimately, it can also stifle one’s ability to read and analyze in the creative ways that characterize the best scholarship. Many, but certainly not all, scholars steeped in the traditional world from youth either spend their careers fighting against their upbringing or apologizing for it. Neusner writes, “I had the advantage of seeing everything fresh because I didn’t know anything.” In other words, freedom from tradition enabled Neusner to know it as an outsider, and then change it.

But Neusner did not come from nothing. He was reared in elite American universities and studied with many of academic luminaries, and it may have been the very particular American lenses through which he absorbed the tradition that enabled him to forge a new path. One could look at European predecessors others such as Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzeweig, Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Emil Fackenheim as examples of those who came to Judaism late, and fresh. While Neusner’s neophyte status coheres with theirs, his Americaness is distinctive.

Perhaps by accident, in his early years, Neusner studied with the most illustrious scholars of Judaism in America, from Wolfson to Saul Leiberman, Salo Baron, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Morton Smith. While many others shared that path, none absorbed, adapted, and then largely rejected the work of these giants in a way that created something quite new and lasting in the study of Judaism.

After graduating from Harvard and spending a year at Oxford, Neunser enrolled in Rabbinical School at the Jewish Theological Seminary. At that time, he wrote, JTS would take anybody, even someone like Neunser, who was wholly unprepared for its course of study. It was there, under the tutelage of one of the greatest Talmudists of his generation, Saul Lieberman, that Neusner discovered Talmud. This discovery would change his life and, unbeknownst to either, would change the course of the study of rabbinics in America.

Neusner did not like JTS. He did respect Lieberman but never really liked him, thought he was an “uninspiring teacher,” and rejected Lieberman’s philosophy that academic Jewish studies was primarily about advocacy and, as Neusner described it “apologetics.” Neusner wrote: “He not only taught texts … but a positive, reverential attitude toward texts.” Neusner’s rejection of this approach would result in one of his most lasting contributions to the study of Judaism: The study of Judaism today in the academy is, at least in part, Neusner’s rejection of a previous generation’s greatest rabbinic scholar. Neusner was never private about his disdain for Lieberman, and Lieberman, very soon before his sudden death, penned a nasty, scathing critique of Neusner’s translation of the Jerusalem Talmud that has its own history in the halls of Jewish academe. It was certainly devastating for Neusner, yet it did not stop the forward motion of his massive intellectual work. While sometimes vicious in his own criticism of others, Neusner was often surprisingly able to accept critique quite well, sometimes publishing revised versions of books that took into consideration criticisms from colleagues and reviewers. While he never liked to do what others were doing, he apparently often listened to what they had to say about his work.

In 1958 Neusner moved down the street from JTS (122nd Street and Broadway) to Columbia University (116th Street and Broadway), where he began his studies in religion. The move marked a significant change in his outlook. As he wrote, this “marked the first time that I saw Judaism as not particular but exemplary, and Jews not as special but (merely) interesting.” His major influence at Columbia would be the great historian of Mediterranean antiquity Morton Smith, whom Neusner described as “the best teacher I ever had.” Smith, who would eventually turn against Neusner in light of Lieberman’s scathing review, cultivated Neusner’s love of rabbinics as part of the study of religion. At Columbia he also studied with the great Salo Baron but had little regard for his work, viewing Baron as a distinctly erudite but largely unoriginal thinker.

This shift from Judaism as part of “ethnic studies” to the study of Judaism as a religion may have begun for Neusner with Smith at Columbia, but was cultivated during Neusner’s brief time teaching at Dartmouth College, where he was part of a lively discussion group that included Jonathan Z. Smith (who Neusner knew from Morton Smith’s seminars at Columbia, which J.Z. attended while still a teenager), who would change the face of religion a few decades later. It also included Hans Penner, a scholar of religion and student of Mircea Eliade, and the great New Testament scholar Wayne Meeks. It was at Dartmouth that Neusner really began to formulate his notion of Judaism as part of the humanities, which would undergird the most prolific part of his career. Much of this dovetailed with a major shift in the study of religion in the American university in light of the 1963 Supreme Court decision in School District of Abington Township, PA v. Schempp that made it unconstitutional to have school-sponsored Bible reading in public schools. The distinction between “teaching religion” and “teaching about religion” would spearhead the emergence of secular religious-studies departments in universities. Neusner was an early proponent of this shift at a time when the study of Judaism was still primarily theological in nature and scope.

One thing that emerges from this early period is Neusner’s rejection of the notion of Judaism as a stable historical category. He prefers “Judaisms” as a more accurate description of how religion functioned in disparate Jewish communities. On this he wrote, “The continuities of Judaism will emerge from the study of their complexities; to reduce ‘Judaisms’ to ‘the essentials of Judaism’ yields something neither authentic nor even recognizable.” While the scholarly debate today has largely rejected the “Judaisms” option, the contemporary framing of a revised version of Judaism as a scholarly category is indebted to Neusner’s earlier intervention.

Neusner’s suggestion to shift Jewish studies from ethnic studies (to part of area studies) or become a more integral part of the humanities would also include Neusner’s rejection of any specialness or exceptionalism of the Jews as a prerequisite for responsible academic work. On this Hughes writes: “Neusner refused to make the Jews special or chosen. To him, they represented one social group trying to make sense of their immediate situation in light of a host of ideas and textual strategies developed in relation to other social groups.” At the time (the 1970s) this was anathema, even blasphemous, in Jewish studies. Today it is a much more accepted, albeit not uncontested, idea.

Neusner’s formative books that rewrote the approach to the study of rabbinics are numerous and have had a deep impact in the field. J.Z. Smith called one important book, Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishna (1981), “A Copernican revolution in rabbinic studies.” A respected colleague and historian of Ancient Israel who is open about his debt to Neunser but also critical of him wrote privately to me that “very little historicist rabbinics written before him, or written later but oblivious to him, can be taken seriously [today]. I also have a feeling he may have done more than anyone to naturalize the study of Judaism in modern American religious-studies departments.”

Neusner may hope that his greatest legacy will be his contribution to rabbinics. For example, his five-volume History of the Jews in Babylonia (1965-1969) was the first foray in what now has become a cottage industry, albeit hotly contested, of reading the Babylonian Talmud in its Iranian context. Neusner studied Farsi and Middle Persian in order to understand the Bavli in context decades before it had become fashionable to do so. In addition, Neusner early on made the suggestion that both Judaism and Christianity are fourth-century religions, which led scholars to rethink questions of the origins of Judaism and Christianity and the “parting of the ways.” These are not incremental shifts in emphasis but major calls for rethinking rabbinics and early Christianity.

Yet while Neusner’s contribution to rabbinics has indeed been profound, even given his errors and misreadings, Hughes suggests his legacy may lie elsewhere. In fact, there are at least three other areas in which Hughes suggests Neusner’s works, largely unnoticed, have changed the way American Jews experience Judaism.

The first is a series of books Neusner wrote in the early 1980s, most notablyStrangers at Home: The ‘Holocaust,’ Zionism, and American Judaism (1981) about the American Jewish obsession with Israel and the Holocaust. One reviewer called it one the best books about American Judaism written in postwar America. This book, not widely known, was one of the first real assessments of the troubling impact that overemphasizing the Holocaust and an obsession with Israel continue to have on American Jewish life. Robert Alter published “Deformation of the Holocaust” that same year in Commentary Magazine, making similar points, but it was not until the 2000s that this topic would become part of the American Jewish conversation. Neusner’s call in the 1980s for the reinvigoration of Jewish learning as the antidote for assimilation—an idea he shared with Will Herberg who made the point differently in 1955—has only now become institutionalized. About this Neusner once wrote, “I favor more Judaism and less Jewishness.”

The second contribution is a three-volume series written in the mid-1970s titled The Academic Study of Judaism: Essays and Reflections. While these books have largely gone unnoticed today, they changed the field of Jewish studies in the academy. Even though the books are somewhat dated, in my view, these volumes should be read by every Jewish studies graduate student pursuing a career in the academy if only because the field today is in large part an extension of what Neusner was advocating more than 30 years ago.

I say that much of Neusner’s work in these areas goes unnoticed because none of these books are widely read or taught today. Yet they should be. For example, Neusner fought against the idea that non-Jews should not be scholars of Judaism, even threatening to sue universities that he thought passed over his non-Jewish students because they were non-Jews. He was highly critical of the Association of Jewish Studies (founded in 1969) in its early years for being too Judeo-centric, so much so that he became alienated from the organization and put his energies into the American Academy of Religion, serving as its president in 1969. And yet at the 2014 Association of Jewish Studies banquet, association President Jonathan Sarna proudly announced the increasing numbers of non-Jewish members of the scholarly society as a celebration of the success of the association in promoting Jewish studies beyond the ethnic bounds of Jewry. Even though in my view AJS has a long way to go before adequately moving beyond its “ethnic studies” past, few in that audience in 2014, certainly not younger scholars, knew that Neusner was making that case in the 1970s.

The third contribution is Neusner’s theological turn in the 1990s, which is best known in his book A Rabbi Talks to Jesus (1992), which Cardinal Ratzinger (soon to be Pope Benedict XVI) wrote was “by far the most important book for the Jewish-Christian dialogue in the last decade.” In 2010 Neusner was awarded the Medal of Pope Benedict XVI. Much of Neusner’s work on Jewish-Christian relations was done in conjunction with Professor Bruce Chilton: That work accelerated when Neusner joined the faculty of Bard College in 2006 and, with Chilton, became a founding member of the Institute for Advanced Theology there.

The move from history to theology in the 2000s is also part of Neunser’s argument that we can view Rabbinic Judaism as “philosophy” that is a worldview that extends beyond law and ritual. It is unusual for a scholar so dedicated to history to take the same data to argue for its philosophical and theological import. But it is this transition that marks the final phase of Neusner’s intellectual oeuvre.

Interestingly, because of the way Neusner crossed disciplinary boundaries, few appreciate the trajectory of his work. For example, historians of Judaism do not usually read his theology, and those interested in his theology do not read his earlier historical scholarship. The result of his fecundity is that few will take the time to draw the connections between the various dimensions of his intellectual projects. I think Hughes gets it right when he writes: “This more theological Neusner was a natural extension of the Neusner who wrote so forcefully about what the study of Judaism must look like in order to be a viable field of study.” Future scholars will hopefully show this in greater detail.

As a public political figure, Neusner was iconoclastic almost to the point of self-contradiction (that is, he was iconoclastic even to himself). With the rise of the New Left and the move toward more progressive policies of many in the humanities, Neusner became a Republican; befriended paleo- and neoconservatives such as Lynn Cheney, William F. Buckley, William Bennett, and Jesse Helms; fought mightily against affirmative action and the Robert Mapplethorpe photography exhibit; and supported many conservative policies, cultural and political, any one of which might have sufficed to make his name anathema to younger scholars who worked without knowing it within an intellectual landscape that Neusner helped to define and create.

His relationship to Israel and Zionism is more complicated. In the 1970s he was an early critic of the Occupation (for a short time he was a member of the American Jewish protest movement Breiria, founded in 1973), and he was an unrelenting critic of the Israeli academy, which he felt contributed almost nothing to furthering the study of Judaism as he saw it. He was a quintessential American Jew, once writing that as a Jew he felt safer in New York than in Jerusalem. In an address he gave to Hillel at MIT in 1952, a mere four years after the founding of the state of Israel, he said, “Israel’s flag is not mine. My homeland is America.” And while he considered himself a Zionist, he did not advocate for American Jews to immigrate to Israel and spent very little time there, going occasionally when he was invited to give lectures. What his views are on the Israel/Palestine conflict now I do not know. In any case, his seemingly quite progressive views, at least early on, somehow co-existed with a sharp neoconservative turn on other matters. His third-grade teacher was indeed right once again.

Finally, one cannot write about Jacob Neunser without addressing his irascible character. There was hardly any controversy (many of his own making) he did not become entangled in. And he readily owned that choice. He once wrote, “I think to any person enjoying the privileges of tenure of a university the question should be asked about not being ‘controversial.’ The facts speak for themselves. I bear my scars and wounds of various controversies as marks of honor and dignity: They show I have done my duty.” Part of the problem here is that he is a man who is still very much among us, a man many of us know or have heard stories about. This is the occupational hazard of evaluating a living intellectual: We either become overly sentimental or overly critical of their personhood. We readily, perhaps conveniently, forget the personalities of luminaries of the past. For example, even from hagiographical data, the great student of the Baal Shem Tov, R. Jacob Joseph of Polonne, who today is revered and widely read, was known to be an intolerable human being. And the antics of R. Menachem Mendel of Kotzk are well documented, not to speak of more contemporary figures like Gershom Scholem or Jacob Taubes. The point is that Neusner was sometimes his own worst enemy, and his personal behavior certainly needs to be part of his legacy. That, and his choice to write as much as he did, have certainly diminished his short-term impact. And yet he persisted. When Hughes asked him if he thought he wrote too much, Neusner responded, “I don’t understand the question.” And I think he was being honest. As with most of us, who he was, and what he did, are integral to one another.

Hughes suggests that “Neusner’s most profound work paradoxically had very little to do with the field he is known for pioneering in the country, rabbinics. Rather, Neusner, for me, is at his most innovative when he deals with the place of Judaism in the American humanities and his more theological work, both of which grew out of his journalistic training.” Which, of course, takes us back to that pugnacious all-American boy in prewar West Hartford, Connecticut. Whether Hughes is right remains to be seen, although I am sympathetic to his view. It is certainly the case that Jacob Neusner’s work on Judaism in the humanities, on American Judaism, and his theological work, is less known than his work on rabbinics or his personal antics. But like it or not, that is part of the messiness of the human condition in the battleground of academe. To my mind, Hughes’s biography accomplishes an important task: introducing to America one of the most important Jewish scholars of Judaism that America has ever produced.

The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches from Syria. by Janine di Giovanni. Bloomsbury. 2016.

The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches from Syria. Janine di Giovanni. Bloomsbury. 2016.

Winner of the Hay Festival Award for Prose, The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria is a first-person account by war journalist Janine di Giovanni based on her time in Syria from May 2012. This book reports on Syria’s descent into civil war, focusing on the stories of ordinary people caught up in the conflict. The Morning They Came for Us provides an honest and necessary corrective to the omission of the personal experiences of war that cannot be captured through maps and statistics, writes Rachel Gabriel.

Since the first anti-government protests broke out five years ago in Syria, more than 250,000 Syrians have been killed. Approximately 12 million people, including the 5 million refugees that have fled to other Arab countries and to Europe, have been displaced. It is hard to comprehend the magnitude of suffering behind such tragic statistics, even harder still to imagine living a moment when everything you know is violently and irreparably shattered. In The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches From Syria, Janine di Giovanni transports readers to the frontlines of the Syrian conflict to meet some of the individuals behind the statistics and to hear their stories of how everything changes when war comes knocking at your door.

The book opens in early summer 2012, approximately one year after the start of the Syrian uprising. War has yet to fully engulf the entire country, and wealthy Syrians and foreigners are still attending champagne-soaked pool parties in Damascus as bombs sound in the distance. Di Giovanni’s account of her time interviewing Syrians on the ground over the next six months reveals the country’s descent into an all-encompassing state of war. The relayed stories of prisoners who have endured torture and rape, soldiers called upon to senselessly murder their fellow Syrians, mothers who have lost children to bombs or sickness, amongst many others, give us a glimpse of how war becomes personal the morning it comes for you, no matter what side you are on.

The early chapters of the book tell the stories of two young activists arrested for their non-violent pursuit of justice. We meet Hussein, a student of human rights law in his twenties, who was captured by Assad’s forces for helping to organise an early peaceful anti-government protest. He was tortured, abused, electrocuted, cut open and left for dead. We meet Nada, a quiet young woman with braces, who describes how rape is used as both a psychological threat and form of physical torture in Syrian prisons. Later in the book, we meet civilians whose lives have been shattered and whose homes have been destroyed by the regime’s horrifying barrel bombs as well as those who have tried to flee their homes only to return after finding no place to go.

Image Credit: Two destroyed Syrian Army tanks in Azaz, August 2012 (Christiaan Triebert, CC2.0)

Di Giovanni’s writing is heartbreaking and honest. As a seasoned war journalist who has covered conflicts in Bosnia, Chechnya and Sierra Leone, she artfully weaves the Syrian narratives into the greater tapestry of war and human suffering around the globe. She describes watching Syria teeter on the brink of total destruction with a sense of foreboding, stopping every so often to take ‘mental snapshots’ of places she senses from experience will not survive the destruction that is to come. Her descriptive prose simultaneously paints war as universally similar in its ability to steal lives and destroy societies, and impossibly unique in the way that it is experienced by individuals.

Denial is a striking theme that runs like an echo throughout the book. Even after war has come knocking and its harsh realities become everyday life, the phrase ‘this is not my Syria’ is uttered by civilians and soldiers on both sides. Nearly every person that di Giovanni speaks to expresses their disbelief that Syrians could kill each other because of sectarian or political disagreements, despite the propaganda and misinformation put forth by the regime. Even those forced to flee their homes maintain that one day they will return to their former lives. Sadly, those who pretend they cannot hear war approaching must acknowledge it once it arrives in the form of a barrel bomb. Di Giovanni writes: ‘What does war sound like? The whistling sound of the bombs falling can only be heard seconds before impact – enough time to know that you are about to die, but not enough time to flee.’ She describes how war can become real slowly, as the rituals of normal life are eliminated one by one until there is nothing left:

As for your old world, it disappears, like the smoke from a cigarette you can no longer afford to buy. Where are your closest friends? Some have left, others are dead. The few that remain have nothing new to talk about.

There are significant moments throughout the book in which being a spectator to the horrors of war feels painfully like cheating. De Giovanni translates her uncomfortable self-awareness of being an outsider to the reader as she describes watching a baby die of treatable respiratory disease at a hospital that will be bombed days later by the regime or peering into a well of floating dead bodies in the wake of a gruesome battle. Throughout her writing, she is painfully and uncomfortably aware that she, the journalist, and we, the readers, are hearing these stories from the other side of an invisible line. She reflects on her ultimate inability to maintain objectivity and emotional distance as a fellow human being, living in a world where little is being done to answer the Syrian people’s desperate cries for help. She writes:

And this is the worst part of it – when you realize that what separates you, someone who can leave, from someone who is trapped in Aleppo, or Homs, or Douma or Darayya, is that you can walk away and go back to your home with electricity and sliced bread; then you begin to feel ashamed to be human.

The Morning They Came For Us stands in stark contrast with much recent writing on the Syrian conflict. Underneath the prevailing conversations about the state of the Syrian conflict and the Middle East, where pundits and analysts frequently focus on ISIS, international interventions and proxy battles for power in the region, the most important story – the human story – is being drowned out. Mainstream analysis of the conflict is often in abstract terms that obscure lived experiences on the ground: conflict is often understood in terms of fighting between opposing groups; the enormous human costs are quantified with numbers and figures; and media reports include highlighted maps of the conflict far more often than realistic coverage of human suffering. Di Giovanni provides a difficult to read, yet fundamentally necessary, corrective to the omission of personal experience as a means by which to understand war. She relays the stories of people on both sides of the conflict as well as ordinary citizens and families caught in the crossfire, leaving readers with an altogether different type of understanding that is impossible to capture with maps and statistics.

The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches from Syria. by Janine di Giovanni. Bloomsbury. 2016.

The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches from Syria. Janine di Giovanni. Bloomsbury. 2016.

Winner of the Hay Festival Award for Prose, The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria is a first-person account by war journalist Janine di Giovanni based on her time in Syria from May 2012. This book reports on Syria’s descent into civil war, focusing on the stories of ordinary people caught up in the conflict. The Morning They Came for Us provides an honest and necessary corrective to the omission of the personal experiences of war that cannot be captured through maps and statistics, writes Rachel Gabriel.

Since the first anti-government protests broke out five years ago in Syria, more than 250,000 Syrians have been killed. Approximately 12 million people, including the 5 million refugees that have fled to other Arab countries and to Europe, have been displaced. It is hard to comprehend the magnitude of suffering behind such tragic statistics, even harder still to imagine living a moment when everything you know is violently and irreparably shattered. In The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches From Syria, Janine di Giovanni transports readers to the frontlines of the Syrian conflict to meet some of the individuals behind the statistics and to hear their stories of how everything changes when war comes knocking at your door.

The book opens in early summer 2012, approximately one year after the start of the Syrian uprising. War has yet to fully engulf the entire country, and wealthy Syrians and foreigners are still attending champagne-soaked pool parties in Damascus as bombs sound in the distance. Di Giovanni’s account of her time interviewing Syrians on the ground over the next six months reveals the country’s descent into an all-encompassing state of war. The relayed stories of prisoners who have endured torture and rape, soldiers called upon to senselessly murder their fellow Syrians, mothers who have lost children to bombs or sickness, amongst many others, give us a glimpse of how war becomes personal the morning it comes for you, no matter what side you are on.

The early chapters of the book tell the stories of two young activists arrested for their non-violent pursuit of justice. We meet Hussein, a student of human rights law in his twenties, who was captured by Assad’s forces for helping to organise an early peaceful anti-government protest. He was tortured, abused, electrocuted, cut open and left for dead. We meet Nada, a quiet young woman with braces, who describes how rape is used as both a psychological threat and form of physical torture in Syrian prisons. Later in the book, we meet civilians whose lives have been shattered and whose homes have been destroyed by the regime’s horrifying barrel bombs as well as those who have tried to flee their homes only to return after finding no place to go.

Image Credit: Two destroyed Syrian Army tanks in Azaz, August 2012 (Christiaan Triebert, CC2.0)

Di Giovanni’s writing is heartbreaking and honest. As a seasoned war journalist who has covered conflicts in Bosnia, Chechnya and Sierra Leone, she artfully weaves the Syrian narratives into the greater tapestry of war and human suffering around the globe. She describes watching Syria teeter on the brink of total destruction with a sense of foreboding, stopping every so often to take ‘mental snapshots’ of places she senses from experience will not survive the destruction that is to come. Her descriptive prose simultaneously paints war as universally similar in its ability to steal lives and destroy societies, and impossibly unique in the way that it is experienced by individuals.

Denial is a striking theme that runs like an echo throughout the book. Even after war has come knocking and its harsh realities become everyday life, the phrase ‘this is not my Syria’ is uttered by civilians and soldiers on both sides. Nearly every person that di Giovanni speaks to expresses their disbelief that Syrians could kill each other because of sectarian or political disagreements, despite the propaganda and misinformation put forth by the regime. Even those forced to flee their homes maintain that one day they will return to their former lives. Sadly, those who pretend they cannot hear war approaching must acknowledge it once it arrives in the form of a barrel bomb. Di Giovanni writes: ‘What does war sound like? The whistling sound of the bombs falling can only be heard seconds before impact – enough time to know that you are about to die, but not enough time to flee.’ She describes how war can become real slowly, as the rituals of normal life are eliminated one by one until there is nothing left:

As for your old world, it disappears, like the smoke from a cigarette you can no longer afford to buy. Where are your closest friends? Some have left, others are dead. The few that remain have nothing new to talk about.

There are significant moments throughout the book in which being a spectator to the horrors of war feels painfully like cheating. De Giovanni translates her uncomfortable self-awareness of being an outsider to the reader as she describes watching a baby die of treatable respiratory disease at a hospital that will be bombed days later by the regime or peering into a well of floating dead bodies in the wake of a gruesome battle. Throughout her writing, she is painfully and uncomfortably aware that she, the journalist, and we, the readers, are hearing these stories from the other side of an invisible line. She reflects on her ultimate inability to maintain objectivity and emotional distance as a fellow human being, living in a world where little is being done to answer the Syrian people’s desperate cries for help. She writes:

And this is the worst part of it – when you realize that what separates you, someone who can leave, from someone who is trapped in Aleppo, or Homs, or Douma or Darayya, is that you can walk away and go back to your home with electricity and sliced bread; then you begin to feel ashamed to be human.

The Morning They Came For Us stands in stark contrast with much recent writing on the Syrian conflict. Underneath the prevailing conversations about the state of the Syrian conflict and the Middle East, where pundits and analysts frequently focus on ISIS, international interventions and proxy battles for power in the region, the most important story – the human story – is being drowned out. Mainstream analysis of the conflict is often in abstract terms that obscure lived experiences on the ground: conflict is often understood in terms of fighting between opposing groups; the enormous human costs are quantified with numbers and figures; and media reports include highlighted maps of the conflict far more often than realistic coverage of human suffering. Di Giovanni provides a difficult to read, yet fundamentally necessary, corrective to the omission of personal experience as a means by which to understand war. She relays the stories of people on both sides of the conflict as well as ordinary citizens and families caught in the crossfire, leaving readers with an altogether different type of understanding that is impossible to capture with maps and statistics.

Culture by. Terry Eagleton. Yale University Press.

Culture. Terry Eagleton. Yale University Press. 

In Culture, literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton turns his attention to defining and pinpointing the role that culture plays in our lives as well as its value, traversing examples including Edmund Burke, Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde. This is an accessible and smart primer that explores how to critique culture under the conditions of global capitalism, though its central ideas will be familiar to those who have already encountered Eagleton’s earlier work, writes Danni Glover.

Terry Eagleton’s Culture does not start out optimistically. ‘Culture is an exceptionally complex word’, the book commences, ‘but four major senses of it stand out. It can mean (1) a body of artistic and intellectual work; (2) a process of spiritual and intellectual development; (3) the values, customs, beliefs and symbolic practices by which men and women live; or (4) a whole way of life.’ These definitions seem specific and meagre, but thankfully the book is less interested in definitions than perspectives, which seem to be more useful in reaching an understanding of the nature and value of culture. The pessimism of the first sentence soon gives way to an erudite but ultimately unoriginal discussion of the forces that enshrine culture and how culture is participated in by consumers – and Eagleton very much approaches the enjoyment of culture as a consumerist exercise. Though lucid, clear and readable in a lightly intellectual kind of way, much of Culture riffs on or repeats Eagleton’s earlier work without substantially building upon it.

As usual, his Marxist critiques are comfortable and thorough: ‘A professional caste of artists and intellectuals, as Marx recognises, becomes possible only when not everyone needs to labour for most of the time […] Culture [has] its material conditions’ (44). He begins the Marxist branch of his argument by showing how culture and civilization grow in parallel to, and contingent upon, each other, but that they are not the same thing; that ‘mailboxes are part of civilisation, but what colour you paint them […] is a matter of culture’ (5).

Eagleton’s discourse on the concept of civilization could benefit from some more thorough engagement with postcolonial scholarship, though a later comment that ‘so much contemporary postcolonial thought […] can simply be a shamefaced inversion of colonial values’ demonstrates that this is not so much an oversight as a dismissal. It is an analysis which is therefore characteristic of Eagleton’s antipathy towards relativism, but I am not entirely convinced that a study of the variance of global culture that does not at least acknowledge the force of colonialism is doing the topic justice. Without postcolonial theory, the analysis feels shallow.
Image Credit: Mural Atlantis Books (Alma Ayon CC2.0)

Where colonial and postcolonial discourse sit most comfortably in the book is in Eagleton’s discussion of Irish writers and intellectuals as culture-makers and critics. Eagleton’s Dublin is a cultural counterpoint to the Edinburgh of the Enlightenment. Where David Hume’s comments on the substance of nations speak to a process of civilising by political (in)stability – ‘Time alone gives solidity to [the rulers’] right […] and operating gradually on the minds of men, reconciles them to any authority, and makes it seem just and reasonable’ (71-2) – it is Edmund Burke who speaks to the cultural formation of nations:


Men are not tied to one another by paper and seals. They are led to associate by resemblances, by conformities, by sympathies. Nothing is so strong a tie of amity between nation and nation as correspondence in laws, customs, manners, and habits of life. They have more than the force of treaties in themselves. They are obligations written in the heart (59).

Eagleton also looks to Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde for their contributions to and ruminations on culture. The chapter on Wilde, though short, is the most enjoyable. Like the nature of culture itself, Wilde is a difficult person to pin down. Eagleton’s assertion that ‘if Wilde was gay, it was among other things because he found heterosexuality so intolerably clichéd’ (99) will no doubt raise eyebrows amongst queer theorists, but it is an interesting statement about culture’s need to mimic, mock and subvert in order to thrive. Eagleton writes approvingly about Wilde’s awareness of how privilege alters the reality of culture – how wealth creates access – and the subsequent analysis about the cultural and leisurely goals of socialism (107) is the most convincing argument in the book, though it too closely resembles similar arguments in Eagleton’s earlier works Why Marx Was Right (2011) and The Meaning of Life (2007).

Eagleton’s final chapter on ‘The Hubris of Culture’ argues that ‘once literary scholars ventured into the study of film, media and popular fiction, there could be no doubt that they had some plausible claim to centrality. They were, after all, engaged with artefacts consumed by millions of ordinary people’ (150). This centrality, Eagleton argues, has led to the rise of the creative industries, an industrial process which ‘amounts to […] capitalism [incorporating] culture for its own material ends, not that it has fallen under the sway of the aesthetic, gratuitous, self-delighting or self-fulfilling. ‘‘Creativity’’, which for Marx and Morris signified the opposite of capitalist utility, is pressed into the service of acquisition and exploitation’ (152). He goes on to argue that the intent of capitalism to assimilate culture has led to the decline of universities. This is a fascinating argument which comes along quite late in the book, perhaps to lay the groundwork for future publications. I hope so; I would be interested to read contemporary Marxist critiques on the neoliberalisation of higher education, an under-discussed issue that affects all of us working, studying and researching in universities. Eagleton might advance a more radical view on this issue than, say, Stanley Fish, but it was certainly the part of the book which I am most keen to see continue as a conversation in forthcoming literature.

Though distinctly reminiscent of earlier, bolder works of theory, Culture is an accessible primer on how we might go about critiquing the existence of culture under global capitalism. In an era which seems to shun intellectualism, it is refreshing to see an unflinchingly smart book that is intended for an audience outside the strictly academic. Fans of Eagleton’s confident prose will no doubt enjoy it, though his sceptics may find its self-referentialism frustrating. It’s not likely to replace his more substantial books on culture on university syllabuses, but it is an enjoyable enough read.