Joel Schalit

On the Radio

Wednesday at noon, former Political Asylum singer and AK Press founder Ramsey Kanaan will be hosting an hour-long discussion about the political legacy of The Clash on Against the Grain, courtesy of Pacifica flagship station KPFA, 94.1 FM in the SF Bay Area, and everywhere else, online.

Ramsey’s guests include yours truly and Craig O’Hara, the author of The Philosophy of Punk: More Than Noise, a new edition of which is scheduled to drop in the new year. If you’re interested in the band, in punk, or in how music and politics collide, we pretty much cover it all.   

Year End Top Ten: Books

Despite the fact that this was a book writing year, I still managed to pack in a few titles that were distinctly off-topic. For regular MashDown readers, of course, that means, unsurprisingly, I read a lot about politics, music and the visual arts, though not necessarily of the gallery kind.

This was also the first time in almost a decade that I was able to read for pleasure, and not for the purpose of assigning books for review. That, in itself, was a welcome change. Instead of scanning a chapter or two and then sending them off, I was able to take in new books in their entirety.

In no specific order, here are the ten tomes that made the biggest impression on me in 2007:

Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land (Verso)

Gil Hochberg, In Spite of Partition (Princeton)

Jacqueline Rose, The Last Resistance (Verso)

Sari Nusseibeh, Once Upon a Country (FSG)

Judith Butler & Gayatri Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State? (Seagull)

Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (Harper Collins)

Michael Veal, Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae (U. New England Press)

Jeff Chang, Total Chaos: The Art And Aesthetics of Hip-Hop (Basic Civitas)

Abby Banks and Thurston Moore, Punk House: Interiors in Anarchy (Harry N. Abrams)

Jennifer Baumgardner, Look Both Ways (FSG)

Liberation Theology

It’s just about out, and the first reviews for Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice, are starting to filter through.

Edited by my former Tikkun colleagues Jo Ellen Green Kaiser and Or Rose, and the Kavod House’s Margie Klein, this inspired collection, documenting the new American Jewish social justice movement, is already receiving the recognition that it deserves. According to this week’s edition of Publisher’s Weekly,

While written for progressive Jews and their communities, anyone
struggling with the age-old conundrum of "…but what can I do?" should
sample this wonderful buffet of ideas, replete not just with tradition,
but with innovative interpretations suited to a 21st-century approach
toward social action and reform.

A slimmed down version of "Everything Falls Apart", the first chapter from my forthcoming book, Israel vs Utopia, has a home in Righteous Indignation‘s Israel section. A representative excerpt, The New Jewish Left, was posted to Mashdown last July.

Recommended Reading

The timing of this book’s publication couldn’t be better. As Israelis and Palestinians resume peace negotiations, its also an opportunity to consider what separation really means, and why there can be no such thing as a total break.

Using Jewish and Arab literature to demonstrate how their respective identities both overlap and inhere in one another, In Spite of Partition makes a compelling case against simple-minded and destructive notions of cultural difference.

If you live in Los Angeles, on October 14th, Gil Hochberg will be speaking about her new book with fellow UCLA professor Saree Makdisi. Click here for more information about the event.

A Canon (of Sorts)

Working feverishly on my next to final chapter, here’s a brief list of the cultural product I’m presently fretting about:

Film

Walk on Water, directed by Eytan Fox (Israel, 2004/US, 2005)
Paradise Now, directed by Hany Abu-Assad (France/Israel/Palestine, 2005)
Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg (US, 2005)

Books

A Little Piece of Ground, by Elizabeth Laird (Macmillan, 2003/Haymarket, 2006)
Palestine, by Joe Sacco (Fantagraphics, 2001)

Music

Magnetic Storm, Smartut Kahol Lavan (CD-R, Boshet, Israel, 2005)
Discography, Dir Yassin ( LP, Alerta Antifascista, Germany, 2006)
Vote Hezbollah, Muslimgauze (Soleilmoon, 1993)

Local Knowledge

A discarded book found on the sidewalk two blocks south, in front of a pretty tough housing project the cops always seem to be raiding. Click on the image for more detail.

Frigging in the Rigging

The commercial success of Christopher Hitchens‘ most recent book, God is Not Great, is generating a lot of interest abroad. Many people are asking whether, in the wake of Bush, and his combination of military violence and Evangelical piety, a new secularism is now formally in the making.

From this vantage point, though I absolutely support such an endeavor, I am not so certain that this is indeed the case. A lot of extremely overdue noise about the political need for secularism, yes, but a broad-based social movement in the US, I remain skeptical. At the moment, its just a cultural exercise.

In this article in the July 27th weekend edition of Maariv, Israel’s largest-circulation daily, I was one of several folks journalist Vered Kellner spoke to about the issue. Though not frequently available in English, if you read Hebrew, Vered’s thoughtful work is always worth catching up with.

Thinking Ahead

When I first began working in publishing, it was the mid-1990s. The ‘zine explosion was already well underway, and the first web periodicals (such as Bad Subjects) were just starting to build the first substantial online readerships. Conversely, in the world of books, traditionally academic, non-fiction publishers such as Verso were beginning to chalk up serious successes with crossover political titles, such as journalist Doug Henwood’s legendary Wall Street.  For the intellectual left, it was a time of immense creativity and ferment.

Compared to the past, according to the headlines, all we currently have to offer is a culture of continuous crises and closures. Music consumption is at an all time low, magazines and newspapers (both in print and online) point to dwindling (and, to be quite frank, aging) readerships, and book publishers keep issuing reports of mounting losses. After my new book is done, one of the things I would definitely like to explore is writing a cultural history of this period. Say, 1989-2009.

Bass Materialism: Grievous Angel Presents Dubstep Sufferah Volume 3
 

Book Report

A short excerpt from "Changing Partners: America or Europe?", the fifth chapter of my forthcoming book, Israel vs Utopia:

To many Jews and Israelis, however ideologically inclined, the charge of colonialism became a symptom of a much larger European about face that expressed itself in a deepening of both east and western European relations with the Arab world, an increase in Muslim immigration to France and the United Kingdom, and the routinization of Europe as the number one foreign site of Palestinian revolutionary violence.

Transpiring to the backdrop of the previous decades’ final regional colonial divestitures by France and the United Kingdom, and Europe thus becomes the right-wing Jewish caricature that it is portrayed to be today: the primary breeding ground of “Islamo-left” anti-Semitism, irrefutable proof that outside of Israel, America is the only place a Jew can truly be safe, if not call, however uncomfortably, home.

No Future

In his highly provocative Only Pinter Remains, Terry Eagleton argues that the utopian impulse in British literature has died. Tracing this tradition from playwright Howard Pinter all the way back to Blake and Shelley, for those not automatically inclined to ascribe left sentiment to the authors Eagleton assembles for this article’s canon, the op-ed, published in Saturday’s Guardian, is a marvelous example of how to encounter politics within culture.

Though Eagleton could (and should) definitely be upbraided for the limited catalogue of ‘approved’ authors that he provides, (and his characterization of the ideological pliability of immigrant writers), Eagleton does a brilliant job of indicting several contemporary authors for aligning themselves too closely with the powers that be. His damning appraisal of Salman Rushdie’s fate, and Christopher Hitchens’ post-9/11 political trajectory hits particularly hard.