Böcker av Ned Curthoys

This edited collection brings together discussions of literary works from Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the Palestinian and Jewish Diasporas, as well as from authors and creators not directly involved with the conflict who are seeking to unpack its complexities for a wider audience. It offers new perspectives into how the Palestine/Israel conflict is, and can be, represented after the Second Palestinian Intifada, an epochal event for both Israelis and Palestinians. This collection foregrounds the thematic concerns that link literary engagements with Palestine/Israel across the globe but also examines the role that aesthetic representation plays in framing the conflict and its power dynamics. It addresses how emergent forms of writing and representation illuminate but also redescribe conflict in the context of Israel and Palestine and how, as in the case of the investigative graphic novel for example, depicting this conflict has had reverberations for representing conflict and conflict zones more widely.

Comparing the liberal Jewish ethics of the German-Jewish philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt, this book argues that both espoused a diasporic, worldly conception of Jewish identity that was anchored in a pluralist and politically engaged interpretation of Jewish history and an abiding interest in the complex lived reality of modern Jews. Arendt's indebtedness to liberal Jewish thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn, Abraham Geiger, Hermann Cohen, and Ernst Cassirer has been obscured by her modernist posture and caustic critique of the assimilationism of her German-Jewish forebears. By reorienting our conception of Arendt as a profoundly secular thinker anchored in twentieth century political debates, we are led to rethink the philosophical, political, and ethical legacy of liberal Jewish discourse.