Articles by: Ned Curthoys

I was profoundly honoured when Arena asked me to review its contributions on the Middle East. No other independent publisher has been so committed to the task of both (re-)describing our geopolitical situation and offering prescriptions for redress that are neither shrill nor doctrinaire. Admirably, Arena has resisted the professionalized peer-reviewed journal's drift towards specialization and coterie discussion; it has taken no notice of the niche journal's fetish for theoretical shadow-boxing, the narcissism of small…

The pluralist, diasporic vision of Jewish identity articulated by German-Jewish intellectuals who sought to combat Christian anti-Semitism, ethnocentric and exclusive conceptions of German nationalism, and Eurocentric ideologies of modernity and progress are discussed. The views of Elia Shohat in her work 'Taboo memories, Diasporic visions: Columbus, Palestine' speaks about the bitter conflicts in the wake of the establishment of Israel, with Arabs and Jews being staged as enemies.

The late Edward Said remarked that we live in a post September 11 epoch of “warring monotheisms”. It is a world threatened by reactionary moral agendas at once insular, punitive and cynical. Two recent books thoughtfully critique such prescriptive moral platforms and the reductive conceptions of history and identity that accompany them. One is Jane Bennett and Michael Shapiro's 'The Politics of Moralizing' (2002), and the other Ghassan Hage's 'Against Paranoid Nationalism' (2003). These books…