First, can I do a bit of bibliographic verification here? I frequently see the publisher of this text given as Gale in the messages on this list. However, when I followed the link to Amazon, the publisher is given as Macmillan. The Macmillan edition on Amazon is three volumes and has a publication date of 2007 (ISBN 978-0028660202). But searching Google by title I found the same item on Gale's site, but again with the Macmillan imprint but with 2008 publication date. I just want to make sure that we're talking about the same edition and suggest that identify the publisher as Macmillan (or at least Gale/Macmillan) to be consistent with the information others will see.
Second, I've added my review of the Zionism article to the Amazon site. Third, has anyone found anything about John Hartwell Moore, the editor? I'm on vacation so I don't have access to my academic sources, but he doesn't show up anywhere in Google except in connection with this edition. The article's author, Noel Ignatiev, however, is a nut-job with a long history of beyond-marginal racial issues. He runs a Web site called RaceTraitor.com with the theme that all racial identity is wrong. He was fired, according to Wikipedia, from a position as a tutor at Harvard for opposing the installation of kosher toasters in a dining hall. He has published academic works on the issue of race but it looks like it's been a while and I don't see anything in the mainstream press on Israel or Zionism. This seems to be an increasingly popular tactic on the anti-Israel front. Find a genuine PhD with no credentials or marginal credentials in any of the related areas to write a pseudo-academic article superficially about Zionism. Since they don't know anything about Zionism, they skate over the facts, or make them up off the top of their heads, whatever suits their larger theme. Terms like "post-Zionism" meaning that the concept is obsolete are showing up more and more. The "racist" tag is an older and once-discredited ploy that's making a comeback in a number of creative ways. "Proving" that Zionism, the foundational ideology behind the creation of the modern State of Israel, is flawed is part of a strategy to attack Israel. (Similar to those who claim there was no Holocaust, or that it was exaggerated, or was a ploy to bolster the Zionist movement, if you can undermine the founding drive to create a Jewish state, that there was no legitimate motivation, it's easier to criticize Israel.) It is important to ignore qualified scholars in the field because a hack will do the kind of half-assed hatchet job you need, overlooking the evidence that might undermine his position and highlighting the most skewed and prejudicial evidence available. We had a "conference" on post-Zionism at UCSC where the panel included a couple of reputable scholars, such as Judith Butler, but was mainly filled out by C-list academics. None of the panelists had any scholarly publications on Zionism to their credit. But all the panelists had taken active roles opposing Israel in their personal lives. That's what it takes to get on a dais or published in an encyclopedia these days, just a willingness to trash Israel without any qualifications or attention to scholarly standards. The convener was an anthropologist who does not teach, conduct research or write on the topic, not a political scientist or historian or Middle East scholar, and she refused any suggestions for speakers qualified to speak on the topic. Ironically, Butler choose to speak on Hannah Arendt as an example of opposition to Israel, however admitting that she hadn't read the _Jewish Writings_ while the editor of that edition sat in the audience. I read an exchange between Norman Finkelstein and one of his reviewers. The reviewer had trashed _Beyond Chutzpah_ saying F. had failed to do scholarly research. F. responded in the letters column that he'd combed through thousands of documents as part of his research. In the same issue, the reviewer responded to F. saying, "Yes, but you brought forward only the evidence that supported your thesis and ignored the rest, and that's not scholarship." I spoke to a local scholar -- a real, dyed-in-the-wool scholar -- about this situation, and he said the thought American academia had come to model itself on the U.S. judicial system where opposing attorneys spend all their efforts trying to suppress the evidence that would hurt their case. Academics today seem to focus completely on establishing their thesis by selectively choosing which evidence to include and ignoring the rest. Had the anthropologist who convened the UCSC "post-Zionism" event conducted her research with the same focus on personal prejudice over scholarly integrity as she brought to assembling a panel of speakers, she could have been accused of academic fraud. There are some fields where "cherry-picking" evidence is not acceptable, but I fear that the social sciences, where most of the academic treatment of the Middle East takes place and where there is so much unexamined prejudice against Israel, has already crossed over to the dark side. -- Lee Jaffe, UC Santa Cruz Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) =========================================================== Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listproc @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 @ osu.edu Ha-Safran Archives: Current: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html History: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/history.html AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org
