Inside Higher Education reports, in A Book on Hold, that “University of Michigan Press last month halted distribution of Overcoming Zionism, which argues that the creation of Israel was a mistake and urges adoption of the “one state” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which Israelis and Palestinians would form a new country, without a Jewish character.”

When Bard professor Joel Kovel’s new book, Overcoming Zionism, caught the attention of the Michigan chapter of Stand With Us, a right wing Israel group, they launched a campaign to press the University of Michigan Press for “an explanation of the arrangement with Pluto Press”, the left wing UK-based publishers of the Bard book. They charge the Univ of Michigan Press with distributing over thirty “anti-Israel” and 50 “anti-American” texts.


Their statement says:

The book is a polemic against Israel, condemning Jewish support for the state and blaming Israel for nearly every wrong, real or perceived, in the entire Middle East. Kovel’s Israel is the very definition of imperialistic and malicious in its systematic oppression of a morally neutral “Palestine.” The book itself is dedicated to Rachel Corrie, “may she live in glory.”

Kovel makes no apologies for his blanket condemnation of Israel and the “unholy complicity” of the United States and the American Jewish community that grants Israel “impunity.” He is more apologetic to his readers for his own Jewishness.

“The Jewish community is no abstraction to me. It is the community from which I sprang, …and no degree of estrangement suffices to nullify the deep web of memory and conflict than links me to Jewry and shapes, however negatively, the foundations of who I am.”

Meanwhile, Kovel may not be getting any support from colleagues at the Press. Dissident Veteran for Peace reprints this August 24th note “reportedly from Pochoda to Kove”l:

Joel,

Because it is a distributed title for Pluto Press, no one at UMP had read Overcoming Zionism prior to the Stand/With/Us diatribe. I and others read it after that assault, and had fully expected to gear up for, at least, a free speech defense. Though I had no trouble with the one-state solution your book proposes nor with a Zionist critique, per se– we had, after all, proudly and successfully published Virginia Tilley — I (and faculty members I asked to read the book, as well) were apalled [sic] by your reckless, viscious [sic], and unmodulated attack on Zionism and all Zionists. For us, the issue raised by the book is not free speech but hate speech. Perhaps such vituperative and aggressive rhetoric works for the barricades, but it cannot be countenanced or underwritten by the university or the university press, even in this peripheral, distributed capacity.

Even worse for me, as a result of your book, the university is in the process of reassessing our relation as a whole to Pluto (and that has been a four year relationship that I have cherished, both personally and professionally). While that review goes on (and I am only marginally involved), we have ceased shipping Overcoming Zionism.

Phil Pochoda
Director
University of Michigan Press

You can contact UMichigan folks directly:
Phil Pochoda, Director
University of Michigan Press
839 Greene Street
Ann Arbor, MI
Phone:
Fax:
E-mail: pochoda@umich.edu

Mary Sue Coleman, President
University of Michigan
2074 Fleming Administration Building
Ann Arbor, MI
Phone:
Fax:
E-mail: presoff@umich.edu

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