The Returns of Zionism, Piterberg. 2008

[scholarsOrAcademics]

The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel by Gabriel Pitterberg. 2008
This is new thinking, a thorough and stimulating study. Not on anti-Semitism or the Holocaust. It is dedicated in memory of Edward W. Said: the conscious pariah par excellence. In the opening Hannah Arendt also is included in the conscious pariah hall of fame. “Like Lazare, Arendt also identified the crucial importance, and at the same time insufficiency, of emancipation as the process that transforms the pariah into a rebelliously conscious pariah. ‘As soon as the pariah enters the arena of politics, and translates his status into political terms’, she observed, ‘he becomes perforce a rebel. Lazare’s idea was, therefore, that the Jew should come out openly as the representative of the pariah, ‘since it is the duty of every human being to resist oppression’. She also agreed wholeheartedly with his position that the conscious parish’s politics ought to include an uncompromising struggle against the Jewish parvenu .With the benefit of hindsight, one senses in Arendt’s sympathy for Lazare’s vitriolic castigation of the Jewish plutocracy the immanence of her own vehement criticism of the Judenrat that would erupt in Eichmann in Jerusalem two decades later.” (page 19)
The back cover has several endorsements. Selecting one, it reads: “In this original and wide-ranging study, Gabriel Piterberg examines the ideology and literature behind the colonization of Palestine, from the late nineteenth century to the present. Exploring Zionism’s origins in central-eastern European nationalism and settler movements, he shows how its texts can be placed within a wider discourse of western colonization. Revisiting the work of Theodor Herzl and Gershom Scholem, Anita Shapira and Ben Gurion, and bringing to light the writings of lesser-known scholars and thinkers influential in the formation of the Zionist myth, Piterberg breaks open prevailing views of Zionism demonstrating that it was in fact unexceptional, expressing a consciousness and imagination typical of colonial settler movements. Shaped by European ideological currents and the realities of colonial life, Zionism constructed its own story as a unique and impregnable one, in the process excluding the voices of an already-existing indigenous people – the Palestinian Arabs.”
I am a new reader of Piterberg. I'm reading his An Ottoman Tragedy: History and Historiography at Play, 2003.I hope his book When and How Was the jewish People Invented? is translated from Hebrew soon.

[scholarsOrAcademics]

1. Shlomo Sand

correction re: "I am a new reader of Piterberg. I'm reading his An Ottoman Tragedy: History and Historiography at Play, 2003.I hope his book When and How Was the jewish People Invented? is translated from Hebrew soon."
The book is not Piterberg's but Shlomo Sand's. Gabriel Piterberg reviewed Sand's book in NLR 59. In the review he states ":its Hebrew edition was on the bestseller list for several months, and the French translation has been through three editions, selling over 25,000 copies and winning the Aujourd'hui Award. Its appearance in English from Verso later this year is sure to stir further debate."