JustASC

Don’t miss Johanna Ginsberg’s excellent profile of Marc Aronson, author of a new book on Israel for teens.  Unsettled: The Problem of Loving Israel (Atheneum) is sort of the anti-Exodus; Aronson wrestles with the myths about Israel’s founding, and ends up aghast at the second-class status of Israel’s Arab citizens. As he tells Johanna:

“I don’t think Zionism is racism. I think ethnic nationalism — which was this turn-of-the-20th-century idea — I don’t ultimately believe it.”

One reviewer has already tagged Aronson a “self-hater,” one of the least helpful, and usually least accurate, labels, in Jewish life. I’m reading the book now, and find Aronson striving hard to balance the two competing narratives in the Middle East. I do think he overdoes the comparisons between Israel and the United States, as if America represents the pinnacle of democratic nation-building, and as if Israel is somehow unique in its conception as a nation-state based on shared ethnic/religio/nationalist identy. But I’ll reserve judgment until I read the whole thing.