A rigorous moral reckoning falters by leaving out half of the equation.
A poet and critic argues that an academic idea has alchemized into jet fuel for antisemitism.
In this slim, carefully argued book, Kirsch contends that the notion of settler colonialism is now a lethal ideology, drunk on its own violence. An editor at the Wall Street Journal, Kirsch says this danger burst into view in the widespread global response to Hamas’ slaughter of 1,200 Israeli Jews on Oct. 7, 2023. “In a time of terrible grief and anger, the ideas discussed here may seem abstract,” he writes, “but in the long term, nothing does more than our ideas to determine the ways we feel and act.” He describes a “frank enthusiasm for violence against Israeli civilians” in much of the current political discourse, asserting that “it’s impossible to understand progressive politics today without grasping the idea of settler colonialism and the worldview that derives from it.” Kirsch identifies its most famous construct, from Patrick Wolfe, a British-born Australian scholar. Wolfe wrote in 1968 that settler colonialism is enacted when “the colonizers came to stay—invasion is a structure not an event.” Scholars pointed this lens initially at Australia, Canada, and the United States. Kirsch sees land acknowledgments as one voguish thread. Others have critiqued land acknowledgments as toothless moral theater, appealing to American Puritanism. But when the settler colonialism lens is applied to Israel, the Jewish state is deemed to be illegitimate, outraging Jewish citizens who see these contested spaces as home. Such seemingly innocuous practices as land acknowledgments, Kirsch argues, lead to young people harassing their Jewish peers on college campuses. They “are not ashamed of themselves for the same reason that earlier generations were not ashamed to persecute and kill Jews—because they have been taught that it is an expression of virtue.” Kirsch, who often writes about Jewish ideas, believes there is “no true indigeneity.” He writes compellingly, laying out his arguments with the care of a poet. But by keeping his focus assiduously off of Israel’s lethal assault on Gaza—and the wider issue of Palestinian suffering—the author dilutes his case.
A rigorous moral reckoning falters by leaving out half of the equation.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781324105343
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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