MikeMarqusee.com

Mukul Kesevan reviews If I Am Not for Myself
B I B L I O, March-April 2 0 0 8

Mike Marqusee’s range as a writer is prodigious. The first book of his that I read was Anyone But England, a brilliant materialist history of cricket in England, one of the best books ever written on the game. I remember thinking then, how extraordinary it was to be informed about a game I had loved all my life, by an American who had grown up in the cricketing wilderness of suburban New York and who had only first encountered the game as an adult in England. And an American Marxist at that! It seemed beyond strange.

Marqusee has since then written studies of Bob Dylan and Muhammad Ali in the frame of the 1960s and this book, as the title suggests, sets his own life in the embattled context of Jewish anti-Zionism. (more…)

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 19 April

Despite an average of 40 violent deaths a day in recent weeks, Iraq, the British Home office insists, is a safe place. Accordingly, 1,400 Iraqi asylum seekers have received letters informing them that they must return home or face homelessness and destitution in Britain. Those who agree to go back will be required to sign a waiver accepting that the U.K. government bears no responsibility for what happens to them or their families after their return. (more…)

Daphna Baram salutes Mike Marqusee’s honest appraisal of his radical journey through religion and politics, If I Am Not for Myself

Review in The Guardian, April 19 2008

The Mishnaic scholar Old Hillel is known, in both the Jewish and non-Jewish world, for his saying “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” It is no accident, however, that Mike Marqusee, a New York-born Jew who has been living in the UK for the past three decades, picked one of Hillel’s more enigmatic and possibly least understood ethical aphorisms to mark the route of his journey to anti-Zionism: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself alone, what am I? If not now, when?” (more…)

Red Pepper, April-May 2008

The Mysterious Chemistry of Social Change: the USA 1968 in Retrospect

The last thing the legacy of 1968 needs is nostalgic commemoration. Even as it was happening, it was being packaged for consumption. Nor should we celebrate it in the name of some abstract spirit of resistance. It was a year of contradictions and confusions, many of which continue to confront anyone who wants to take part in a movement for radical change. (more…)

New from Verso …

If I Am Not For Myself
Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew

by Mike Marqusee

“When I had finished this book, I wanted to cheer… The personal and the political coalesce, making this book, subtitled “the journey of an anti-Zionist Jew", a rare and precious work. Its polemical force is anchored in experience…If Jewish adolescents got Marqusee’s book as a barmitzvah present, there might be a chance of avoiding the repetition of history’s mistakes .” - The Independent, 21 March

“A tour-de-force of political and cultural analysis of various aspects of Jewish, Zionist and anti-Zionist history and politics. Marqusee touches on many painful spots … The comparisons he draws between Zionism, Hindu nationalism, and other similar and dissimilar political phenomena are incisive and accurate. He shies away from no controversy, and his account of recent dealings with incidents in and around the anti-war movement - which attracted accusations of antisemitism - are penetrating and intellectually honest…. a manifesto for a whole generation of Jewish radical activists who refuse to be deterred by the threat of being labelled, and libelled, as self-haters.” - Daphna Baram, The Guardian (more…)

Justice for Palestine: Commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Nakba

Mike Marqusee speaks on “If I Am Not for Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew”

Organised by Hackney Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods

20 May
(more…)

An edited extract from If I Am Not for Myself on the Red Pepper website.

Versions of this article appeared in The Hindu and The Guardian’s Comment is free

It’s testimony to the awkward power of Martin Luther King’s life and work that so much effort has gone into sanitising his memory. Today he’s commemorated as an apostle of social harmony, a hero in the triumphant march of American progress. But at the time of his death forty years ago, on April 4 1968, his increasingly radical challenge to war and poverty had made him deeply controversial, spied on and harassed by his government, feared and loathed by millions of Americans. (more…)

Michael Letwin interviews Mike Marqusee about “If I Am Not for Myself” at MRZine.

Review: What Sport Tells Us About Life: Bradman’s Average, Zidane’s Kiss and other sporting lessons by Ed Smith.

The Independent, 4 April

Contrary to the title, this is really a book about what life tells us about sport, in particular, what we can learn about elite sport by examples and analyses drawn from other disciplines. The author, Middlesex captain and sometime England batsman Ed Smith, writes clearly and with a welcome disrespect for sporting cliche. Very unusually for a cricket writer, he is careful to refine his arguments and set them out in logical fashion. (more…)