Books
CO-MEMORY AND MELANCHOLIA:
Israelis Memorialising the Palestinian Nakba
Ronit Lentin
ISBN hb 9780719081705
The 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel also resulted in the destruction of Palestinian society when some 80 per cent of the Palestinians who lived in the major part of Palestine upon which Israel was established became refugees. Israelis call the 1948 war their ‘War of Independence’ and the Palestinians their ‘Nakba’, or catastrophe. After many years of Nakba denial, land appropriation, political discrimination against the Palestinians within Israel and the denial of rights to Palestinian refugees, in recent years the Nakba is beginning to penetrate Israeli public discourse.
This book explores the construction of collective memory in Israeli society, where the memory of the trauma of the Holocaust and of Israel’s war dead competes with the memory claims of the dispossessed Palestinians. Taking an auto-ethnographic approach, Ronit Lentin makes a contribution to social memory studies through a critical evaluation of the co-memoration of the Palestinian Nakba by Israeli Jews.
Against a background of the Israeli resistance movement, Lentin’s central argument is that co-memorating the Nakba by Israeli Jews is motivated by an unresolved melancholia about the disappearance of Palestine and the dispossession of the Palestinians, a melancholia that shifts mourning from the lost object to the grieving subject. Lentin theorises Nakba co-memory as a politics of resistance, counterpoising co-memorative practices by internally displaced Israeli Palestinians with Israeli Jewish discourses of the Palestinian right of return, and questions whether return narratives by Israeli Jews, courageous as they may seem, are ultimately about Israeli Jewish self-healing rather than justice for Palestine.
THINKING PALESTINE
Ed. Ronit Lentin
Hardback: £60.00 ISBN: 9781842779064 -
Paperback: £18.99 ISBN: 9781842779071 -
This book brings together an inter-disciplinary group of Palestinian, Israeli, American, British and Irish scholars who theorise ‘the question of Palestine’. Critically committed to supporting the Palestinian quest for self determination, they present new theoretical ways of thinking about Palestine. These include the ‘Palestinization’ of ethnic and racial conflicts, the theorization of Palestine as camp, ghetto and prison, the tourist/activist gaze, the role of gendered resistance, the centrality of the memory of the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) to the contemporary understanding of the conflict, and the historic roots of the contemporary discourse on Palestine. The book offers a novel examination of how the Palestinian experience of being governed under what Giorgio Agamben names a ’state of exception’ may be theorised as paradigmatic for new forms of global governance. An indispensable read for any serious scholar.
What People Have Said About the Book
‘This book presents us with sharp critical thinking about everything from the applicability of Agamben’s concept of the “state of exception” or Foucault’s theory of modern “biopower” to Israel’s control over Palestinians in prisons, camps, and ghettos, to the specific dynamics of racialization, colonial violence against, and appropriation of Palestinians, even by the well-meaning. Both theorizing and chronicling the varied forms of Israeli power, these provocative essays are grounded in details that can still shock.’ - Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University
‘This timely volume provides a fresh epistemological framework to think Palestine in the context of the Israeli colonial occupation of its territories as well as of its dispersed populations. It shifts the center of gravity from the temporal dimension of ’state of exception’ to its spatial as well as its racializing features. The book makes an important critical contribution to political theory and deserves to be read by anyone concerned with the question of Palestine.’ - Yehouda Shenhav, Tel-Aviv University
Reviews:
Because its contributors — sociologists, historians, legal experts and cultural critics — work from within an activist perspective, Thinking Palestine escapes the trap of “scholastic reason” (Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase), whereby the content of theory reflects the walled-off condition of the theorist comfortably ensconced in her/his “schola.” The book should be read closely by serious pro-Palestinian activists wishing to sharpen their conceptual tools in the ceaseless battle against Zionist propaganda.
Raymond Deane, Electronic Intifada- http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9743.shtml
The authors analyze the Israeli-Palestinian state of exception on different realms. Some discuss the racial basis of the state of exception; others exhibit how problematic practices are adopted by the Israeli army or the Israeli security forces; and yet others deal more directly with the representation of Palestine in different discourses: political or academic. This broad scope provides the lay reader with an interesting introduction to the Palestinian perspective, and it provides the well-versed reader with some interesting case studies which broaden the scope of present analyses of the Palestinians (e.g. management of the moment of death in a chapter on ‘Thanatopolitics’)… Overall, it is an important book for students of Palestine, but ipso facto of those interested in Israel too. The two political entities are exceptionally entwined, and the book provides an original conceptual discussion for framing this state of exception.
Gad Yair, Hebrew University Jerusalem, Sociological Research Online, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/14/1/reviews/yair.html
ISRAEL AND THE DAUGHTERS OF THE SHOAH
Reoccupying the Territories of Silence
Ronit Lentin
ISBN 978-1-57181-775-4 Pb ( 2000)
ISBN 978-1-57181-774-7 Hb ( 2000)
The murder of a third of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis is unquestionably the worst catastrophe in the history of contemporary Judaism and a formative event in the history of Zionism and the State of Israel. Understandably, therefore, the Shoah, written about, analyzed, and given various political interpretations, has shaped public discourse in the history of the State of Israel. The key element of Shoah in the Israeli context is victimhood and as such it has become a source of shame, shrouded in silence and subordinated to the dominant discourse which, resulting from the construction of a “new Hebrew” active subjectivity, taught the postwar generation of Israelis to reject diaspora Jewry and its alleged passivity in the face of catastrophe.
RE-PRESENTING THE SHOAH FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
Edited by Ronit Lentin
ISBN 978-1-57181-802-7 Hb ( 2004)
Despite Adorno’s famous dictum, the memory of the Shoah features prominently in the cultural legacy of the 20th century and beyond. It has led to a proliferation of works of representation and re-memorialization which have brought in their wake concerns about a ‘holocaust industry’ and banalization. This volume sheds fresh light on some of the issues, such as the question of silence and denial, of the formation of contemporary identities — German, East European, Jewish or Israeli, the consequences of the legacy of the Shoah for survivors and for the ’second generation,’ and the political, ideological, and professional implications of Shoah historiography. One of the conclusions to be drawn from this volume is that the ‘Auschwitz code,’ invoked in relation to all ‘unspeakable’ catastrophes, has impoverished our vocabulary; it does not help us remember the Shoah and its victims, but rather erases that memory.
WOMEN AND THE POLITICS OF MILITARY CONFRONTATION
Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation
Edited by Nahla Abdo and Ronit Lentin
ISBN 978-1-57181-459-3 Pb ( 2002)
ISBN 978-1-57181-498-2 Hb (2002)
As the crisis in Israel does not show any signs of abating, this remarkable collection, edited by an Israeli and a Palestinian scholar and with contributions by Palestinian and Israeli women, offers a vivid and harrowing picture of the conflict and of its impact on daily life, especially as it affects women’s experiences that differ significantly from those of men.
RACE AND STATE
Edited by Alana Lentin & Ronit Lentin
Cambridge Scholars Press, September 2008 [June 2006]
Speaking about racism in the western political climate of the first decade of the twenty-first century is more difficult than ever before. There is a feeling in post-colonial and post-immigration societies that the blatant overt racism of the past is no longer as pressing. Admitting racism elicits discomfort because common wisdom tells us that racism opposes everything that we believe in as citizens of democratic, “civilised” modern states. Yet state racism appears to be here to stay and, in many ways, is more acceptable than ever before. Immigration detention centres, the deportation of “failed” asylum seekers and “illegal” immigrants, racial profiling and the rolling back of liberties won by the civil rights movement are all examples of how state racism impacts on our daily lives. Race and State contributes to breaking the taboo of discussing the links between “race” and state. The papers collected in this book highlight the interconnections between “race” and state, from historical, theoretical or contemporary sociological perspectives. MORE…
(RE)SEARCHING WOMEN
By Anne Byrne and Ronit Lentin
Published by Institute of Public Administration, 2000
ISBN 1902448464, 9781902448466
This is the first Irish academic text on feminist research methodologies. It brings into the public domain the debate about feminist research in Ireland as a tool for social change.
RACISM AND ANTI-RACISM IN IRELAND
Edited by Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh
Published by Beyond the Pale Publications: Belfast (2002)
ISBN 1900960168 (pb)
In a context where “I’m not racist, but” is still more preface than parody, Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh’s challenging volume provides a significant overview of pressing debates for Irish society, and perhaps more importantly, a critique of the terms on which some of those debates are currently being conducted. As the 1990s progressed, substantially increased yet relatively minor flows of migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers to Ireland generated both a raft of depressingly familiar institutional and individual reactions to the economic and cultural consequences of the ‘flood’, and a robust response from civil society, activists and researchers. This book aims to build on what has become a steady stream of recent publications and provide a central text for students and a wider ‘interested’ readership. In this it is largely successful, if marginally less so in negotiating a relationship between the types of writing it brings together. MORE…
GENDER & CATASTROPHE
Edited by Ronit Lentin
Zed Books: London (1997)
ISBN: 9781856494458 (hb)
ISBN: 1 85649 446 2 (pb)
This collection brings together a wide variety of feminist academics and activists to explore the gendered and gendering effects of violence against women in war and other disasters.
The contributors explore the ways in which women are targeted as ethnic subjects in extreme situations such as major wars, genocides, famines, slavery, the Holocaust, mass rape, and ethnic cleansing.
The female experience of methodical genocidal rape in the former Yugoslavia, women’s coerced participation in the Rwandan massacre, the comfort women system during World War II, the gendering of genocidal strategies during the Holocaust, nuclear testing in the Pacific and the reproduction ‘policy’ in Tibet are all subjected to in-depth analysis.
The result is a book which integrates women’s differing experiences of war and violence into a wider framework – a framework which uncovers the true consequences of identifying women as simultaneously sexual objects, transmitters of culture and symbols of the nation.
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