Jacqueline Rose has written a timely and courageous book. One immediate sign of this is its dedication to the late Edward Said, and its rewriting of the title of one of his most important books, The Question of Palestine (1980). To write 'as a Jewish woman' and in homage to Said about the failures of the Israeli state will surely inspire some of the hate mail that Said himself received for more than thirty years as the major Western explicator of Palestinian history and Palestinian rights. Recent events, including the New York City Department of Education's barring of Columbia University's Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian, from lecturing to schoolteachers, and the British Association of University Teachers' soon overturned boycott of Haifa and Bar-Ilan Universities, make clear that public sensitivity to anything concerning the question of Palestine remains very high.

LRB 23 June 2005 | PDF Download