Philosophy in the Military-Intellectual Complex (original) (raw)
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Toe establishment of the State of Israel in I 948 was at once the Zionist move ment's greatest triumph and the beginning of an ongoing crisis of self-doubt. Its principal goal achieved, Zionism could have ceased to exis� as did the movement for women's suffrage in the United States with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Indeed, some Jewish leaders quickly argued that its historical mission was complete; its continued existence served no useful purpose. For Amer ican Jewry as a whole, which had emerged after the Holocaust as the largest Jewish community and chief representative of the Jewish Diaspora, the transformation of Palestinian Jewry into an independent political entity immediately made their relationship highly problematic.
Jewish Intellectuals and the Crisis of Modernity [Syllabus, in English]
The course looks at intellectual responses of Jewish political thinkers to the age of extremes. We shall read from the writings of Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Isaiah Berlin. We shall examine their analyses of enlightenment, nationalism, socialism, and totalitarianism, their life stories, and their direct and indirect role in creating a transatlantic political discourse in postwar years. We will try to ask ourselves to what extend were their political and philosophical writings designed as a response to the maladies of the twentieth century, and to what extent did their Jewishness notify their writings, if at all. By doing so we shall be able to contextualize historically the fundamental features of Jewish intellectual activity after 1945. *No prior knowledge of political science, philosophy and/or Jewish studies are required.
The collective Jew: Israel and the new antisemitism
Patterns of Prejudice, 2001
For Theodor Herzl, Zionism, in the sense of a political movement to establish a sovereign Jewish state, offered the only workable solution to the problem of antisemitism. Some commentators today speak of a 'new antisemitism'. They claim, first, that there is a new wave or outbreak of hostility towards Jews that began with the start of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000 and is continuing at the present time. Second, and more fundamentally, the 'new antisemitism' is said to involve a new form or type of hostility towards Jews: hostility towards Israel. This is the claim under discussion in Klug's paper. The claim implies an equivalence between (a) the individual Jew in the old or classical version of antisemitism and (b) the state of Israel in the new or modern variety. Klug argues that this concept is confused and that the use to which it is put gives a distorted picture of the facts. He begins by recalling classical antisemitism, the kind that led to the persecution of European Jewry to which Herzl's Zionism was a reaction. On this basis, he briefly reformulates the question of whether and when hostility towards Israel is antisemitic. He then discusses the so-called new form of antisemitism, especially the equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. He concludes by revisiting Herzl's vision in light of the situation today.