The Question of Zion » (ANN)

Jacqueline Rose is Professor of English at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of "The Haunting of Sylvia Plath", "States of Fantasy", the novel "Albertine", and "On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis in the Modern World" (Princeton).

"Jacqueline Rose proposes a suggestive analysis of a communal neurosis gripping Israel. Her examination . . . is topical and important."--Amos Elon, author of The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933.

"I never thought it would be possible to articulate the psyche of Zionism without descending into superlatives or foul language. Jacqueline Rose has succeeded admirably where others have failed."--Ilan Pappe, Haifa University, author of A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples

"Jacqueline Rose speaks as a Jewish woman who deeply feels the traumatic pain of her people and because of that pain is anguished by the violence towards another people entailed in the Zionist project. While one may dispute her thesis that the source of this violence lies within the inner logic of the Zionist vision, one cannot ignore the moral urgency of the questions she raises with trenchant intelligence and a probing psychological insight."--Paul Mendes-Flohr, Divinity School, University of Chicago, and Director, The Franz Rosenzweig Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

"This is a brilliant and highly original book on the mindset of modern Zionism and its principal progeny--the State of Israel. Jacqueline Rose is a formidable scholar with a writing style that is at once forceful and subtle. She offers--with intellectual honesty and fair-mindedness--new and very compelling explanations of the gap between the theory and practice of Zionism."--Avi Shlaim, Oxford University

Cynthia Hoffman - Tikkun

Rose asks the right questions: is it possible to talk about the suffering of the Jewish people and the violence of the Israeli state in the same breadth? Why is criticism of Israel construed as a denial of the Jewish people's right to self-defense? Can any state act with impunity on grounds of self-defense? And finally, if part of the messianic view of world history is that 'it is part of the cosmic order of things that the nation must live on a knife's edge,' as her analysis suggests, is it possible for there to be peace?