MikeMarqusee.com

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 15 June 2008

Four years after it was stolen by masked gunmen in broad daylight, and two years after it was recovered in still undisclosed circumstances, The Scream has gone back on display at the Munch Museum in Oslo.

The Scream is one of the world’s most well known and widely reproduced painted images and its return to the pubic gaze is being properly celebrated. Nonetheless, as I examined the merchandise on sale at this remarkable museum – the tee-shirts, coffee mugs, mousepads, all adorned with the familiar image – I couldn’t help but feel that in this case familiarity has bred an alienating fog. The shock of the image has dissipated. (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 .” - Michael Kustow, The Independent

“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…)

On The Book Depository website, Mike has listed and commented on his (provisional) “Top Ten” books.

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 1st June

“This is the end of political correctness in London,” exulted a Conservative as newly elected Mayor Boris Johnson entered city hall.

Nearly a month after the polls closed, it is still an extraordinary thought that London, of all places, is to be represented in the eyes of the world by a man like Johnson. (more…)

New Humanist, May-June 2008

Israel’s 60th birthday is being celebrated lavishly in Britain. The programme includes a gala fund-raising dinner at Windsor Castle in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh, a variety show at Wembley Stadium and street parades in London and Manchester.

Meanwhile, Palestinians and their supporters will be recalling the same event in entirely different tones, without the benefit of state support or vast sums of money. In meetings, conferences and exhibitions they are seeking to remind the world of the Nakba – catastrophe in Arabic – that accompanied Israel’s birth in 1948. (more…)

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 4 May

Reading some English commentators on the Indian Premier League, you’d think it was the end of civilisation as we know it. For years there’s been a steady undercurrent of resentment at the expanding influence of India in world cricket. Now, with the IPL threatening to undermine the English domestic season, it’s grown to a chorus of dismay. The verities of cricket seem to be dissolving in the whirlwind of the global marketplace. (more…)

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…)

Outlook (India), 19 April

The International Olympic Committee is hoist on its own petard. On the one hand, it insists that politics and sport must be kept separate. On the other, it relies entirely on cooperation with governments to stage its quadrennial show. So keeping politics out of sport ends up meaning keeping whatever is politically inconvenient (especially to the host nation) out of sport.

It’s been that way since at least 1936, when the IOC persisted in holding the Olympics in Nazi Germany, in defiance of an international call for a boycott. (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…)