Word: jews
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This letter is in reponse to Steve Lichtman's editorial evaluation of David Shipler's book, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirit in a Promised Land. His analysis of the book is probably fair, but in the process he makes various political assertions of his own which are unqualified, vague and even factually untrue...
...neither Arab nor Jew," he writes. "By culture and creed, I should suffer neither pain nor passion over the causes and battles that entangle the two peoples. And yet...I cannot help caring." What led him to care was "the human dimension" of the Arab-Israeli conflict: "The question of how Arab and Jew saw each other began to emerge as...the target of my search for understanding...
...Arab and Jew is the result of his search. In examining the human dimension of the Arab-Jewish conflict, Shipler pays only passing attention to its diplomatic, military and political aspects. Instead, he focuses on Arab and Jewish images of one another and how the two peoples interact where they live together under Israeli authority...
...same misguided attempt at evenhandedness underlies Shipler's chapters on the images Arab and Jew have of each other. He tries to prove his point with examples of stereotyping in Arab and Jewish schoolbooks. While Israeli textbooks are guilty of condescension toward Arab culture, Jordanian textbooks used in West Bank schools--and Arab newspapers in general--exhibit virulent militarism and anti-semitism and never mention peaceful reconciliation as a goal. Instead, Arab elementary school children read poems such as "A bullet in the chest of the criminal aggressor/Is more delicate than the whisper of the poem and more merciful...
...aspirations. In describing the lack of awareness of the Holocaust--the basis for the existence of the Jewish state--among Arabs, Shipler captures the underlying tension of Israeli society. But this paragraph, the most important and perhaps the best written in the book, is as isolated in Arab and Jew as Israel is in the Middle East...