Anti-Zionism, Mistranslation, and the Problem of the Century

Zusatztext

How have Jews and Zionism, Israel and Palestine been read, debated, and represented in the United States since the early twentieth century? Michael Eskin addresses this question in a work of cultural-discursive archeology. Focusing on the convergence of pro-Palestinian and Black lives activism before and especially after Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, he traces a line of influential interventions from W. E. B. Du Boiss The Souls of Black Folk (1903) through Edward Saids The Question of Palestine (1979) to Ta-Nehisi Coatess The Message (2024). Eskin argues that entrenched patterns of Black antisemitism have at times merged with broader U.S. anti-Zionism, shaping todays controversies. He further contends that key debates rest on enduring misreadings and mistranslations of foundational Zionist texts by Theodor Herzl and Vladimir Jabotinsky, among others, originally written in German and Russian, perused in the original ostensibly by only a few, yet consumed in noxious mistranslation by a great many with often-calamitous real-life consequences.

Autorenportrait

Michael Eskin is a New York-based author, critic, translator, philosopher, and publisher. A former Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and Visiting Fellow at New College, Oxford, he has taught at Cambridge and Columbia Universities. His many books include: Childhood: An Essay on the Human Condition (2024) and The Emprise of Poetry: Durs Grünbein, America, Antisemitism, and the Pursuit of Liberty (2024).

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