Author: Haley Gray
New York Times best-selling author and self-described advocate-journalist Max Blumenthal visited campus Monday to give a talk on his new book, “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Israel.”
Blumenthal has devoted his career as of late to reporting on mounting racism inside Israel, the aggressive Israeli public relations machine and the campaign to indoctrinate a sense of nationalism and fear in Israeli youths. His book centers on these themes.
Despite having earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Pennsylvania and without any industry-specific training, Blumenthal managed to forge a career in journalism.
“Just by studying history I was forced to write all the time. I didn’t even bother with some of my general requirement classes, there were some classes I didn’t even go to,” Blumenthal said of his college days. “But I wasn’t even screwing around, I was in the library doing just whatever reading, I just piled up the books, immersing myself.”
Beginning with a video he and his colleague produced for The Nation on the topic of growing xenophobia and blatant racism towards African immigrants in Israel, it seemed that Blumenthal aimed to shatter preconceived notions that his audience might have had about Israel’s innocence.
Preaching to a choir of DWA major students, professors and J-Street U members, virtually no contestation of that matter was voiced. The question and answer session veered towards where to go from here, having rejected Israel’s self-purported victimhood as an excuse for entrenched racism and human rights abuses on both sides of the green line.
The conversation turned to the efficacy of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which J-Street opposes but Blumenthal supports, and the validity of the two-state solution J-Street is in favor of and Blumenthal is cautiously unsupportive of.
Acceptance of the view of Israel taken up in Blumenthal’s book is far from mainstream, though. In an interview with The Occidental Weekly, Blumenthal criticized prominent liberal voice Eric Alterman, featured in The Nation.
“Support for Israel has been pervasive in the intellectual world of liberals…. Aldermen is sort of one of the last ones holding in to this idea of a democratic Jewish state with a liberal enlightened tradition,” Blumenthal said. “And I think my book puts the lie to it.”
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