Joel Schalit

Into the Valley

On Sunday October 10th, I’ll be speaking about  Israel vs. Utopia at the Thames Valley Limmud in Reading, England. If you’ve ever had the opportunity to attend a Limmud event, in either the US or the UK, they’re really something else. I’m thrilled to have been invited to participate.

It’s been eighteen months since we first made our move to Milano from London. Though I’ve passed through Heathrow several times, I haven’t had the chance to go into town and catch up with any of my friends. Here’s to a short, albeit fascinating trip to one of my all-time favorite places.

Jerusalem Calling

A feature on Israel vs. Utopia was published on Friday, in The Jerusalem Post. The article also discusses my first book, Jerusalem Calling, and what ties the two titles together.

Sound Recording

The third stop on my US book tour was in San Francisco. A podcast of my reading was just posted to the City Lights website.

Their Eyes Were Watching Gaza

Political insight is almost always far-sighted, and the Americans who invest their energy in worrying about the Israel-Palestine conflict are no exception. It is no accident that leftists in the United States started paying closer attention to that topic right when the American government, preoccupied with its own agenda, stopped doing so. The Bush Administration’s hands-off approach to the conflict, in sharp contrast to that of the administrations that preceded it, cried out for initiatives to be undertaken in civil society.

It wasn’t just the Bush Administration’s neglect of the Israel-Palestine conflict that elevated it to a central cause of the post-9/11 American Left, of course. But it sure helped. Indeed, as much anger as the Administration’s approach to the region inspired, that neglect may have been more influential in the end, for what it cleared was a pathway to intervention. Progressives were already struggling with a profoundly limited sense of agency. In the absence of government involvement, however, they found it easier to imagine their actions having a direct effect on the situation in Israel and Palestine. From this perspective, the absence of official interference actually seemed to be as much a blessing as a curse.

As the decade wore on, American political opinions about the conflict appeared to be significantly less hampered by the poorly informed provincialism that both Israelis and Europeans have long ascribed to the United States. Whether or not one agrees with the positions that Americans started adopting as a consequence of their interest in the topic is not important. What matters is that we take that investment seriously, understanding that it is the result of the Middle East’s increasing prominence in the psychological life of the United States.

-Excerpted from Israel vs. Utopia

The European Question

Given the enormity of the losses suffered by European Jewry between 1933 and 1945, the deterioration of Israeli-European relations after the Six-Day War may seem like a quaint afterthought. Or, at the very least, an event that one would expect to have originated in Jewish instead of European circles. After all, Jewry had more than its fair share of reasons to reject European civilization in toto given the tragedy that had just befallen it. As many critical, scholarly analyses of European culture since the Second World War have demonstrated, the Nazi genocide was a perverse by-product of the same historical and social developments that helped define what it means to be Western.

Anti-Semitism was not a foreign import, but European through and through. And it wasn’t backward, a residue of pre-modern Europe, either. No, the racism expressed towards the Jews from the nineteenth century onward, even as it mobilized earlier forms of anti-Semitism, went hand in hand with the outwardly rational forces of modernity. The problem for European Jews, particularly in Western Europe, is that they typically identified with these forces as well, going out of their way to convince themselves that anti-Semitism was the antithesis of modernity.

This conviction added to the difficulty of disidentifying with Europe, even after the Holocaust had demonstrated once and for all that Jews could never hope to be fully assimilated in Gentile society, however modern it seemed.  From Theodore Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”) onward, Zionist ideology has always regarded Jewish national identity as being culturally European. What “European” meant in this context, however, was complicated. Summing up Herzl’s position in the Socialist Register in 1970, Belgian Jewish Marxist Marcel Liebman argued that Herzl envisioned his Israel-to-come as a European outpost, both for practical purposes – protection from its neighbors – and for ideological reasons.

- Excerpted from Israel vs. Utopia

Ahmadinejad As Zionist

Regimes like Iran need Israel to give the people they rule–many of whom are destitute due to systematic economic and political discrimination–an external object for their anger. Not only is the U.S. far too large to serve this fetishistic function, the reach of its consumer culture, particularly in the form of movies and popular music, makes it hard to regard America as fully external. In a sense, the U.S. is too near even when it’s thousands of miles away. By contrast, Israel is a place that people throughout the Middle East can imagine reaching in a geographical sense – the testing of missiles is always reported together with their cruising range – but it’s not part of their domestic experience. This has made it a fine scapegoat for the entirety of its six-decade existence.

What has changed since 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is that the political psychology of the region has been shaken by the physical proximity of American forces. Just as Israel has had to come to terms with the fact that the United States is now practically a virtual geographic neighbor, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria and, above all, Iran have had to deal with the repercussions of a military imperialism as invasive as the cultural sort that preceded it. The American presence in the region has never been so thoroughly embodied. For this reason, the old stand-by of hostility towards Israel is being summoned, often hysterically, as a way to shore up the cracks in these countries’ political identities.

Milestones and Memories

Milestones

I delivered the first chapter of Israel vs. Utopia on Tuesday, and received the first feedback about the book today. Everything was absolutely right on, and extremely helpful. I can’t over-emphasize what a different experience it is being edited again after the last three years of being the so-called editor. Very cool. Instructions are all systems go: continue writing and sending in the chapters.

A big shoutout to my longtime publisher and friend, Johnny Temple. We first met by email in the Fall of ’99, over an article in Punk Planet about indie labels and health care which, as a member of Girls Against Boys, he’d been interviewed for. I’m not sure what occasioned this first exchange. Here’s to banging out more dissenting product together. I can’t think of a better editor to be working with – as always.

Memories

In 1996-1997, I formed incredible friendships with two extremely gifted and inspiring individuals: Dan Sinker, the publisher of Chicago’s Punk Planet magazine (and now, Punk Planet Books, which Dan runs in collaboration with Johnny), and Rich Jensen, who was then the COO of Sub Pop records in Seattle, and the co-owner of Up Records, which put out the first Modest Mouse and Quasi albums.

For nearly seven years, I served as Dan’s second, in the capacity of PP’s Associate Editor, in addition to producing copious amounts of copy as a contributor. For a little over three years, I put out Christal Methodists records with Rich on our own little stealth imprint, Kolazhnikov after the band was dropped from a manufacturing and distribution deal by Sub Pop over sample clearance concerns.

Over the course of the past two weeks, I managed to spend two of the best days in recent memory with both gentlemen. Dan came over last week, together with his two year-old son, Roosevelt. Visiting the Bay Area for personal reasons, it was the first time we’d seen each other since the spring of 2002, when I spent a week in Chicago giving book readings and worked out of the Punk Planet office.

Yesterday morning, I met Rich at the 24th street BART station, and spent the day walking around San Francisco together. Stopping over here for a few hours en route to a business event in LA, it was the first time we’d seen each other since November 2003, when Rich curated a series of readings and events in the Bay Area on behalf of his publishing house, Clear Cut Press.

Very special to have had the opportunity to hang out with both Dan and Rich after all this time. Things are changing so much in our cultural end of the world. Its beyond poetic to spend time with these two specific folks at such a significant juncture. Even better, given what a tremendous sense of community connecting with all three of these guys continues to provide.