Books by "Paul S. Auerbach"
4 books found
Before 1967, Israel had the overwhelming support of world opinion. So long as Israel's existence was in harmony with politically correct assumptions, it was supported, or at least accepted, by the majority of "progressive" Jews, especially in the wake of the Holocaust. This is no longer the case. "The Jewish Divide Over Israel" explains the role played by prominent Jews in turning Israel into an isolated pariah nation. After their catastrophic defeat in 1967, Arabs overcame inferiority on the battlefield with superiority in the war of ideas. Their propaganda stopped trumpeting their desire to eradicate Israel. Instead, in a calculated appeal to liberals and radicals, they redefined their war of aggression against the Jews as a struggle for the liberation of Palestinian Arabs. The tenacity of Arabs' rejection of Israel and their relentless campaign - in schools, universities, churches, professional organizations, and, above all, the news media - to destroy Israel's moral image had the desired impact. Many Jewish liberals became desperate to escape from the shadow of Israel's alleged misdeeds and found a way to do so by joining other members of the left in blaming Israeli sins for Arab violence. Today, Jewish liberals rationalize violence against the innocent as resistance to the oppressor, excuse Arab extremism as the frustration of a wronged party, and redefine eliminationist rhetoric and physical assaults on Jews as "criticism of Israeli policy." Israel's Jewish accusers have played a crucial and disproportionate role in the current upsurge of antisemitism precisely because they speak as Jews. The essays in this book seek to understand and throw back the assault on Israel led by such Jewish liberals and radicals as Tony Judt, Noam Chomsky, George Steiner, Daniel Boyarin, Marc Ellis, Israel Shahak, and many others. Its writers demonstrate that the foundation of the state of Israel, far from being the primal sin alleged by its accusers, was one of the few redeeming events in a century of blood and shame.
Using Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's seminal work on the dialectical nature of the Enlightenment as a framework, Youngman makes the original claim that realist authors are a particularly rich source in which to study the intersection of technology and mythology.
The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal
by Paul D. Moreno
2013 · Cambridge University Press
The story of the breakdown of limited government in America and the rise of the federal state.
Poetry against Torture sets out the clear conflict between two competing conceptions of society and civilization. Poetry represents one: the fundamental human capacity to make itself and its societies in ways that will produce the most nearly perfect form of the species. Torture represents the other—especially state torture—as that which fears the human capacity to evolve, to create alternative futures for itself, and to assume increasingly capacious and democratic responsibility for the justice and joy of its own being. Set against the dogmas of state regimes that torture, against the misapplications of technology to the destruction of human subjectivities, and against the use of spiritual traditions to suppress human poesis, this book speaks for poetry as the highest form of human consciousness, self-making, and imaginative possibility. Paul Bové sets out to remind society and intellectuals of the species’ dependence upon those historical processes of self-making that result from and make possible such remarkable achievements as Dante’s poetry, Bach’s music, and the very being of humanity as a historical species that has the right to imagine and create its own futures. To that end, it discusses poetics, Dante, and the great critic William Empson. It asks how essential is liberalism to human history and treats Mill at length. It asks about the relative importance of philosophy and poetry, and so discusses such contemporaries as Foucault and Said along with traditional figures such as Descartes and Vico. Among poets Wallace Stevens and George Herbert take central places as exemplary teachers. This is a book for all who abhor that persistently vile potential within modernity that prefers tyranny to democracy and analysis to imagination, who rather seek the reaffirmation of poetry, historicism, and humanity as the best chance for the human species to develop and for individuals to perfect themselves. “In these lectures, Paul Bové mounts a persuasive and moving defense of historical humanism against the pressures of authoritarian politics and their unwitting allies in academia on both left and right. In our post-9/11 world he reminds us of the ethical responsibility critics owe to history and to the human, and of the power of poetry against torture. A timely meditation for the present on the heritage and significance of criticism.” —Wlad Godzich, professor of General and Comparative Literature, and Critical Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz “Poetry against Torture is a tour de force of the mind from one of the great critical thinkers of our times. A work of extraordinary erudition, it represents criticism at its most ambitious and most responsible. In its call for a radical return to an understanding of poesis as the fashioning of the human, it makes available anew old resources of intellect and affect in the struggle against the forms of barbarism that seem to rise repeatedly from within bourgeois civilization. It will refresh our understanding of such seminal figures as Vico, Mill, Empson, Foucault, and Said.” —Aamir Mufti, associate professor of Comparative Literature, UCLA, and author of Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture