A powerful polemicist in defense of Jews, Israel By ARNOLD AGES
From Chicago Jewish Star Vol. 22 (Aug. 17-30, 2012), p. 9
I must confess to have experienced an initial disquiet upon approaching Edward Alexander’s collection of very literate reviews, essays and think pieces, some of the latter based on books and articles which he has analyzed.
This is a genre which, in past encounters with several examples, has inevitably left me somewhat disappointed because of the lack of internal unity in the themes explored.
Alexander’s book, The State of the Jews: A Critical Appraisal (Transaction Publishers, 2012, 248 pp., $34.95), however, is a welcome exception because he has, in each exquisitely polished entry, identified what Rabelais used to call la substantifique moelle (“the essential marrow”) of the issue.
The marrow here is the disgraceful assault on Jews and the State of Israel coming from both gentiles and Jews in the last decade.
In the 10 full-length book reviews and the 17 essays and think pieces (derived in part from his Gargantuan reading habits) Alexander proceeds first, in an orderly fashion, to document the anti-Semitic rot which courses through the thinking of some of the luminaries of English literature, before moving to the more current war against Jews and Israel, a war aided and abetted by misguided members of the Jewish tribe.
Some of those tribal members who live in Israel are also the special target of the author’s critical volleys.
“The other country, right or wrong” is the way Alexander characterizes the attitudes of some of the more repugnant representatives of the Israeli left.
Alexander is a powerful polemicist who possesses a biting sense of humor, which he deploys in an essay about how deceased Jewish grandmothers are being converted to radical anti-Israel positions by extreme Jewish leftists today and made to parrot anti-Zionist and anti-Israel tropes. (And we thought that only the Mormons were engaged, mutatis mutandi, in this kind of mischief!)