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Explores how exceptional conditions surrounding the state of Israel—its suffering of existential insecurity—predisposes its citizenry to the virtue of moral attentiveness.
Paying "moral attention" to the world has been exhorted philosophically by the likes of Emmanuel Levinas, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch. This entails attending to the true nature of being, to the individuality of life—its sublime particularity—and transcending a habitude of cultural convention and a self-centered consciousness. Discerning reality in this way would further entail an ethical engagement with the Other: discerning the practice of a true goodness. Exceptional Israel aims to understand Zionism as an expression of such moral attentiveness, exploring Zionism historically, ethnographically, critically, and personally. Author Nigel Rapport argues that the abjection of Jewishness through the millennia—a suffering that includes the state of Israel (up to and including October 2023), a state whose existence has never been assured—causes Israeli Jewishness and moral attentiveness to be linked to an exceptional degree.
"Exceptional Israel takes on a hugely ambitious task of theoretically and empirically capturing an extremely tacit universal process—namely, the moral meaning-making of collectivities (and the selves that make up a part of those collectivities) in the throes of moral, existential, and political crises. It becomes clear from page one that Rapport powerfully intuits that the current crises in the Jewish world and in the Middle East, despite the hardship and suffering—or precisely because of that hardship, as he so eloquently asserts—offer rare moments of intense moral clarity and sublime meaning." — Carol A. Kidron, University of Haifa
Nigel Rapport is Professor Emeritus of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St. Andrews and Founding Director of the St. Andrews Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. He is the author of "I Am Here," Abraham Said: Emmanual Levinas and Anthropological Science and Cosmopolitan Love and Individuality: Ethical Engagement Beyond Culture.
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Ronald Stade
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introductory
1. Exceptional Israel: Historical "Miracle"
Part I. Moral Attention
2. Iris Murdoch, the Ethics of Attention, and the Truth of the Real
3. The Artistic Journey of Felix Nussbaum: Jew, Bourgeois, Witness
Part II. Zionism in History
4. George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, the Balfour Declaration, and the Founding of the State of Israel
5. Ronald Storrs, Edward Said, and the Anti-Zionist Chargesheet
Part III. Zionism in the State of Israel
6. Moral Exceptionalism: Israel's "Human Politics of Humanity"
7. Perspectives on an Anthropology of Israel
8. In the Aftermath of October 7, 2023
Afterthoughts
9. Israel as Hurt-Geography
10. Reviewing Exceptional Israel with Ronald
References
Index