Todd > Recent Status Updates

Damn. Blown away.

White (my favorite environmental historian) is a clear writer who makes complicated historical conflicts open up, but also draws important conclusions from the evidence. The intro about Lincoln's assassination was a lovely read. Small details of the immediate aftermath of the Civil War & Reconstruction have surprised me, such as how freedpeople guarded and cared for the unmarked graves of union soldiers in the south.

The Herzl chapter (1880s-1907) abounds in historical detail, but raises many questions, e.g., Why was no one thinking of the inhabitants of any of the lands they were considering colonizing? Pogroms, mass suffering (and I do mean mass), and antisemitism answer "why Zionism" in general, but Laqueur barely touches on the details of the many competing threads of Zionisms, focusing only on the central political line.

Through Ch. 2 which brings you up to Herzl. Really thorough and fascinating history of the background and context of the development of political zionism. He's an old school european historian, however; I much prefer the more recent trends in American historiography to write around themes and arguments rather than encyclopedic recountings. But structure aside, so far so good.

Given the baldly apartheid basic law just passed in the Knesset, I figure it's time I educate myself more deeply on this history of the idea of Zionism (I'll tackle history of Israel after). I can already tell, sadly, that Israel today has veered far and wide from these early ideals.

The essays in this book are weirdly not in chronological order, so the development of Buber’s thinking is not foregrounded. But given the controversy that Buber’s read of Hasidim has provoked within Jewish Studies, I’m reading it out of order. I began with the 1908 essay, The Life of the Hasidim.

Just finished the introduction. Fantastic. No administration gets off in his analysis of the decline of diplomacy since Nixon. Trump is the malignant stage of a disease that’s been festering for decades—the militarization of foreign relations and the centralization of decision making in the White House rendering diplomacy moot. I fear what I’ll find as I keep reading.

Ch. 1 is the best description of Marx’s basic theory of capital I’ve ever seen.

Ch.1 is the best explanation and description of Marx’s basic theory of capital I’ve ever read. Looking forward to the next chapter.

Taking a break from War and Peace. I haven't read Woolf since I was an undergrad. I'm blown away.

Well, the war has finally started, people are dying, and the silly romanticization of bloodshed in the younger characters if finally wearing off. The narrative is picking up.

Critics of queer politics from African American perspectives. Awesome.

Ah, this translation is infinitely better than the P&V. Also, people have started dying, so the narrative is picking up.

Only three essays in, but already, mind blown, especially Possar's critique of Butler from the standpoint of a transsexual subjectivity.

Zornberg is a genius. The idea of wilderness and an entire generation disappearing into the sands, she successfully turns into an internal, ethical examination.

This book is really fascinating. Panko is arguing that these "roads not taken" in Zionism are ways to think about the contradictions between universalist, sovereign nation-states, and cultural pluralism and global solidarities.

I just sat in a cafe and sipped coffee and read war and peace for 30 mins. For some reason this made me very happy and also made me giggle at the absurdity.

Wow, I wasn't quite expecting this. Hardcore political theory about nationalism, fascinating history about the theoretical debates, then situating the zionism debates within those larger early 20th century debates and differentiating between the range of zionisms before 1948 and how statist-zionism became normative by late 1960s. Whoa.

I'm surprisingly really enjoying this novel, but haven't had much time to just lie back and read.

Who knew that I'd one day be reading a gloss of Edmund Burke be a renowned Marxist?

I wasn't expecting this book to be so hilarious. I suspect that Ch. 2 will make many postmodern cultural theorists angry. I do think he is unfair and mischaracterizes some of the theories—postmodernism is a bit to big and contradictory to be easily glossed—but I have very similar criticisms of the basic throughlines of cultural theory over the past 45 years or so, although my critique is a rejection of idealist philo