RaveThe New York Review of BooksA penetrating, wide-ranging, heart-wrenching exploration of life in Palestine under Israeli occupation. I know of no other writing on Israel and Palestine that reaches this depth of perception and understanding.
James Loeffler
MixedThe New York Review of BooksThere is indeed, as James Loeffler shows in Rooted Cosmopolitans, a strong historical link between European Jews and the struggle for human rights in the twentieth century ... Loeffler tells the stories of remarkable people ... Loeffler’s account of their quixotic struggles is replete with irony ... The Jews have, needless to say, no monopoly over such sentiments, but they do, despite everything, have an inescapable affinity with them. Not even fifty years of occupying and colonizing Palestinian land can entirely vitiate the empathy for the oppressed that is the Jews’ historic inheritance—though it is possible that the occupation is itself a cruel and distorted mutation of that same traumatic history. It is, however, a deep betrayal of one major strand of the tradition that predates, by many centuries, Enlightenment attempts to define universal values.
