Living with Hate in American Politics and Religion: How Popular Culture Can Defuse Intractable Differences

Jeffrey Israel

Published by Columbia University Press 2019

Living with Hate in American Politics and Religion

How Popular Culture Can Defuse Intractable Differences

Jeffrey Israel
Preface by: Martha C. Nussbaum

https://doi.org/10.7312/isra19016

Overview
Contents

About this book

Jeffrey Israel offers an innovative argument for the power of playfulness in popular culture to make our capacity for coexistence imaginable. He explores how people from different backgrounds can pursue justice together, even as they play with their divisive grudges, prejudices, and desires in their cultural lives.

Author / Editor information

Jeffrey Israel is an associate professor in the Department of Religion and the Jewish Studies Program at Williams College.

Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. She is the author of many books, most recently The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis (2018), and the winner of the 2018 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture.

Reviews

Martin Kavka, author of Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy:
Reality might fall short of the ideal, but Jeffrey Israel does not. Living with Hate in American Politics and Religion is so wonderfully fluid that it feels as though Israel is reading a scholarly bedtime story.

Joshua Cohen, author of The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays:
Jeffrey Israel has written an amazing book. He wants us to love America in a distinctly political register that ties our individual flourishing to the flourishing of every compatriot. Political love is essential to realizing the promise of justice. But he knows that political love must live alongside historically rooted animosities that deeply divide us. Israel squares this apparent circle with play. In play, we give full-throated voice to our animosities: we engage them, with no thought of transcending them. Seems too good to be true? Start with the beautiful chapter on Lenny Bruce, and then go for a great ride.

Hasia Diner, author of We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962:
In the post-World War II era, Jews, many of them the children of immigrants, moved into a prominent place in the production of the nation's popular culture and sought to make sense of their relationship with the many other kinds of Americans with whom they shared their society. Drawing on a deep and nuanced understanding of this history, Jeffrey Israel makes a compelling case for the importance of play in allowing Americans to live together.

Charles W. Mills, author of Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism:
How can a more perfect American union be attained given our legacy of historical group injustices and corresponding enduring group antagonisms? In this brilliantly original synthesis of insights from political philosophy, moral psychology, and Jewish American humor, Jeffrey Israel argues that through 'play'—not a facile (and unachievable) national Kumbaya reconciliation, but a reenacting of grudges in a bracketed psychological space backgrounding the political—we can at least come to live with each other in a way that recognizes our common vulnerable humanity.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Foreword Martha C. Nussbaum Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xxiii
Introduction: Loving And Hating America Since The 1990s Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Jewishness, Race, And Political Emotions Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	27
2. The Fact Of Fraught Societies I: The Problem Of Remainders Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	74
3. The Fact Of Fraught Societies II: The Problem Of Reproduction And The Missing Link Problem Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	100
4. The Capability Of Play Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	131
5. Playing In Fraught Societies Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
6. Lenny Bruce And The Intimacy Of Play Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	190
7. Phillip Roth Tells The Greatest Jewish Joke Ever Told Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	213
8. All In The Family In The Moral History Of America Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	242
Epilogue: Losing Our “Religion” In The Domain Of Play Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	270
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	285
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	351

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;

eBook

Published: April 15, 2019
ISBN: 9780231548755