An eloquent and deeply felt memoir exploring the author's complex relationship with his Jewish identity. If I Am Not For Myself is a passionate, thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be Jewish in the twenty-first century. It traces the author’s upbringing in 1960s Jewish-American suburbia, his anti-war and pro-Palestinian activism on the British left, and life as a Jew among Muslims in Pakistan, Morocco, and Britain. Interwoven with this are the experiences of his grandfather’s life in Jewish New York of the 1930s and 40s, his struggles with anti-Semitism and the twists and turns that led him from anti-fascism to militant Zionism. In the course of this deeply personal story, Marqusee refutes the claims of Israel and Zionism on Jewish loyalty and laments their impact on the Jewish diaspora. Rather, he argues for a richer, more multi-dimensional understanding of Jewish history and identity, and reclaims vital political and personal space for those castigated as “self-haters” by the Jewish establishment.
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Mike Marqusee. If I Am Not For Myself
IF I AM NOT FOR MYSELF
Contents
Preface
1. Names and Faces
2. The War Against Analogy
3. An Intimate Accusation
4. The Emancipation of the Jews
5. The Prophet Armed
6. A Militant Jew
7. In Ancient Palestine
8. The War in the Bronx
9. Nakba
10. Diasporic Dimensions
11. Confessions of a “Self-Hating Jew”
Acknowledgments
Notes. Preface
1 Names and Faces
2 The War Against Analogy
4 The Emancipation of the Jews
5 The Prophet Armed
6 A Militant Jew
7 In Ancient Palestine
8 The War in the Bronx
9 Nakba
10 Diasporic Dimensions
11 Confessions of a “Self-Hating Jew”
Bibliography
Отрывок из книги
IF I AM NOT FOR MYSELF
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Despite the charges and countercharges of separatism and assimilationism, the opposition between Bund and Iskraites was not as clear-cut at the time as it may seem in retrospect. Both sides agreed that there was a distinctive Jewish culture and workers’ movement, and, vitally, that its ultimate fate rested on the advance of the larger social democratic movement. What they could not agree about was the framework for that interaction. And that was partly because both sides were burdened with an intellectual apparatus of “nationality” which could not accommodate the indeterminacy of Jewishness, and the multidimensionality of Jewish relationships with non-Jews.
Even after the Bund withdrawal, Jews continued to join the RSDWP in disproportionate numbers, and there remained a substantial number of Jews among especially Mensheviks but also Bolsheviks (famously Zinoviev and Kamenev).* Yet the Bund continued to outstrip the RSDWP as a force on the ground. In the summer of 1904, it claimed 23,000 members, three times the Russian party’s membership.11
