Shalom Lappin at normblog on Therapists to the Jews: Psychologizing the 'Jewish Question'.
Since one of Lappin's main targets here is Jacqueline Rose, it's worth reading his detailed review of her book "The Question of Zion" at Democratiya from a couple of years back. Rose responded here, and Lappin replied here.
From Lappin's article: "She [Caryl Churchill] portrays Jewish children as obsessively raised with the collective memory of historical trauma ..."
I wonder why no one comments on the habit that some Muslems have -- even political leaders -- of referencing such things as the Crusades, or even the "loss" of Spain (El Andalus) as though it all happened yesterday. Some westerners even believe it has to be taken into account to understand such things as 9/11, or 7/7, or Madrid. When Bush used the word "Crusade" as a metaphor (the only way it is ever used) our newspapers were filled with comments about how "insensitive" he was.
MEMRI has a lot of information if any or our fearless playwrites care to produce "Seven Muslim Children", but I don't think it will happen.
Posted by: Dom | May 18, 2009 at 03:10 PM
The fact that Rose and Churchill find it necessary to go to all this tortured hermeneutics to find a crowd-pleasing explanation for the basic human instinct of self-defense and self-preservation says more about their damaged identity than it does about Israelis or "Zionist" Jews.
My own family comes from Turkey. My grandfather, in 1940, left a pretty good life there because he found irresistible the idea of a country in which Jews were fully independent and sovereign. I know many others who were fed up with their precarious existence in either official, or unofficial, dhimmitude in Muslim countries and sought a more dignified existence in the Zionist project. It's the most natural instinct in a human being, isn't it? Yet here are these two so-called intellectuals, the one a playwright, the other a teacher of English Literature specializing in psycho-analysing novels, attempting to force their warped understanding of humanity upon none other than Jewish collectivity. Is there a greater irresponsibility of ignorance than this? They created a pat little "narrative" of Jewish trauma and will stop at nothing in disseminating their foul theories, in a world all too willing to believe that Jews are not quite like other human beings.
Posted by: Noga | May 18, 2009 at 05:03 PM