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Between Past and Present, Jew and Arab: An Exchange between Gil Anidjar and David N. Myers

The Sound of a Tree

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2010

Gil Anidjar  and
David N. Myers
Gil Anidjar*
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York City, New York
David N. Myers*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California
*
[email protected]
[email protected]
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Extract

Amira Hass, Haaretz's fearless journalist, recently told the following joke, an allegory of sorts, set during the Turco-Russian war. Moishele is about to depart for the front, and so his mother offers some sensible advice. “Please take care of yourself, my son. Pace yourself. Kill a Turk all right, but then make sure you rest afterwards. Eat something. Sleep a little. Then go back if you must, kill another Turk, and take another break. Drink lots of fluids, and make sure you maintain and replenish your strength.” “But Mamele,” retorts Moishele, “What if while I am eating and resting, there comes a Turk to kill me?” “Oy va voy, my son! Why would anyone do such a thing? What could he possibly have against you?”

Type
Exchange
Information
AJS Review , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , November 2010 , pp. 395 - 403
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2010

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References

1. Rawidowicz, quoted in Myers, D., Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2008), 60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; all parenthetical references in the text refer to this book.

2. “Inside” and “outside” refers here to Makdisi, Saree, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008)Google Scholar, but see also Mufti, Aamir R., Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Hochberg, Gil Z., In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; and Piterberg, Gabriel, The Returns of Zionism: Myth, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (New York: Verso, 2008)Google Scholar.

3. Ginzburg, Carlo, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John, and Tedeschi, Ann (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), xi–xiiGoogle Scholar.

4. See Ratzabi, Shalom, Between Zionism and Judaism: The Radical Circle in Brith Shalom 1925–1933 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002)Google Scholar, and Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon, Exil et souveraineté: Judaïsme, sionisme et pensée binationale, preface by Carlo Ginzburg (Paris: La Fabrique, 2007)Google Scholar.

5. The American reader might think, with a measure of bafflement, that the work of this author, S. Yizhar, is not available in English. The title of two major short stories is not mentioned under a recognizable English title, much less in their published English translations, absent from both notes and bibliographies (see Between Jew and Arab, 120). “Sipur Hirbet Hiz'ah, The Story of Hirbet Hiz'ah” and “Ha-shavui, The Prisoner” are of course very well-known stories, which have been variously anthologized and are otherwise widely, if partially, available; see, for example, Yizhar, S., Midnight Convoy and Other Stories, with an introduction by Dan Miron (Jerusalem: Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, 1969)Google Scholar.