RUTHFULLY YOURS

The State of the Jews examines the current predicament of the Jewish people and the land of Israel, both of which still stand at the storm center of history, because Jews can never take the right to live as a natural right.

The volume comprises celebrations and attacks. Edward Alexander celebrates writers like Abba Kovner, Cynthia Ozick, Ruth Wisse, and Hillel Halkin, who recognized in the foundation of Israel shortly after the destruction of European Jewry one of the few redeeming events in a century of blood and shame. He attacks Israel’s external enemies—busy planners of boycotts, brazen advocates of politicide, professorial apologists for suicide bombing—and also its internal enemies. These are “anti-Zionist” Jews, devotees of lost causes willfully blind to the fact that Israel’s creation was an event of biblical magnitude. Indifference to Jewish survival during World War II was the admitted moral failure of earlier American-Jewish intellectuals, but today’s “progressives” and “New Diasporists” call indifference virtue, and mistake cowardice for courage.

Because the new anti-Semitism, tightening the noose around Israel’s throat, emanates mainly from liberals, Alexander analyzes both antisemitic and philosemitic strains in three prominent Victorian liberals: Thomas Arnold, his son Matthew, and John Stuart Mill. The main body of Alexander’s book is divided generically into history, politics, and literature. At a deeper level, its chapters are integrated by the book’s pervasive concern: the interconnectedness between the state of Israel and the spiritual state of contemporary Jewry.

Editorial Reviews

“By turns tough-minded and elegant, witty and contentious, Edward Alexander’s essays and reviews engage their subjects in bracing and always illuminating ways. Anyone who wants to learn about ‘the state of the Jews’ will find Alexander a perceptive and provocative guide. A brilliant polemicist, he has few rivals among commentators on contemporary Jewish themes.”

—Alvin H. Rosenfeld, professor of English and Jewish studies, Irving M. Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies, director, Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, Indiana University

“To anyone conscious of the extent to which the higher journalism today, both in America and Europe, trades in willed self-delusion, these essays will come as a decided relief. Witty, pungent, brutally intelligent and wickedly well informed, they demonstrate that the American mind, in spite of everything, is alive and kicking. Alexander’s range is enviably wide. . . . Inevitably, many of these essays touch on the antisemitism once again haunting intellectual discourse. Because antisemitism has killed so many people, we tend to treat it, sometimes grudgingly, with respect. These essays reveal it squarely for what it is: a delusion of the very stupid; a standing offence against the wit, humanity, intelligence, and decency that Alexander’s work so abundantly embodies.”

—Bernard Harrison, Emeritus E. E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy, University of Utah, emeritus professor in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Sussex, UK

“One reads this book with moral and aesthetic admiration. Its frightening message is that the so-called ‘new antisemitism’ is really the old antisemitism in a new disguise. It is a page-turner. Edward Alexander is battle-toughened in the trenches of intellectual combat. He knows his Jews, his Judaism, his history, and he sees through the disguises of their enemies with the accuracy of a veteran marksman. You could not find a better guide through the underworld of latter-day Jew-hatred. On top of this, Edward Alexander never wrote a dead sentence in his life. Here is an object lesson in the congruence of character and style, moral courage, and intellectual clarity.”

—Abigail L. Rosenthal, professor of philosophy emerita, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, author of A Good Look at Evil and Conversions: A Philosophic Memoir