Recommended Reading on Israel, Palestine, and the War on Gaza

Two novels shaped my earliest thinking about the formation of the state of Israel. I read James Michener’s The Source (Random House, 1965) and Leon Uris’s Exodus (Doubleday, 1958) in boarding school at Rift Valley Academy (ca. 1986-89). Equally influential from a Palestinian perspective, was a memoir, Elias Chacour’s Blood Brothers (Chosen, 1984), which I read in Canada in grade 11 (1989-90). By the time I left for a year of study in Israel in the summer of 2000, I had also read Thomas Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989) and, I’m ashamed to say, not much else about Israel or Palestine. 

Living in Jerusalem gave me a front row seat on the beginning of the second intifada. From the Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus, we could see evidence of the violence unfolding on the Temple Mount. From our apartment in West Jerusalem, we could hear the Israeli army shelling Bethlehem. And we tried not to think too much about suicide bombers when we boarded a city bus. 

Personal experience can lull you into thinking you know what you are talking about, but does not qualify you to speak with any sort of competence. To understand a region’s present, you must learn about its past. Although I tried to keep an eye on current events, I did little to educate myself about Israel’s immediate past in the years that followed, except for a couple audiobooks. I listened to Amos Oz’s memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness (Harcourt, 2005), in 2018 while cycling to and from a research library in Cambridge. Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (Spiegel & Grau, 2013), which I “read” in 2016, filled in the picture through the early 2000’s. 

News about Hamas’s brutal attack on Oct 7, 2023 and Israel’s inevitable response was too painful to follow closely after the initial shock. I also didn’t want to read anything shrill or reactionary ... and I thought I knew something about the conflict. 

I knew I knew nothing about Ukraine, however, so earlier this year I listened to Serhii Plokhy’s, The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History (Norton, 2024), which had been recommended as a reliable primer on the geo-politics of Ukraine, including Russia’s 2014 and 2022 invasions. On the analogy of Ukraine, where my ignorance is complete, I finally decided to look for an audiobook related to the conflict in Israel and the occupied territories. 

• I began with Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (Metropolitan Books, 2020). Khalidi hails from a prominent Palestinian family with centuries-long ties to Jerusalem. Before retiring in 2024, he was the Edward Said professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. The picture Khalidi paints of Israeli colonialism and American collusion between 1917-2017 is deeply troubling. Critical reviews of the book sometimes take issue with Khalidi’s framing of the conflict in colonial terms, but I am not aware of any that dispute the facts he has assembled. To my surprise, I found Khalidi more even-handed than Plokhy, who understandably, and rightly, makes a case for Ukrainian national identity.

• I turned from Khalidi’s Palestinian perspective to Peter Beinart’s just-releasted Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025). Beinart addresses his own anti-Zionist criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza to an insider Jewish audience. His argument is measured and, to my mind, compelling. It is also theological: The biblical prophets, Beinart suggests, would have had something to say about a Jewish exceptionalism that presents itself as always the victim and never the perpetrator:

“From the destruction of the Second Temple to the expulsion from Spain to the Holocaust, Jews have told new stories to answer the horrors we endured. We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated, with the support of many Jews around the world. Its central element should be this: We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims. We are not hardwired to forever endure evil but never commit it. That false innocence, which pervades contemporary Jewish life, camouflages domination as self-defense. It exempts Jews from external judgment. It offers infinite license to fallible human beings.” (10) 

“The legitimacy of a Jewish state—like the holiness of the Jewish people—is conditional on how it behaves. It is subject to law, not a law in and of itself (100). 

Blanket support for the state of Israel is, according to Beinart, a form of idolatry. Christian Zionist readers predisposed to support Israel without criticism should take note.

I have learned enough, I hope, to disclaim competence or punditry. But if you are at all concerned about current events in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, I recommend starting with Beinart and moving from there to Khalidi—perhaps especially if your political orientation tends to differ from theirs. (For an Israeli perspective, try Shavit.)

If you have recommendations of your own, feel free to share them in the comments.

On Reading Biblical Hebrew: Advice for Beginners

My advice for students with a year of Biblical Hebrew under their belts who want to launch out on their own:

(1) Read & listen through the passage at least once without stopping to identify forms and unfamiliar words.

• A high-quality recording produced by the Bible Society in Israel can be streamed or downloaded at Bible.is. (The recording is in a modern Israeli pronunciation, which means that distinctions between vocal and silent shewas are not always maintained, etc.)

• Another more traditional recording narrated by Abraham Shmueloff can be accessed here: https://www.torahclass.com/audio-bible-in-hebrew.

(2) Look up unfamiliar forms:

• StepBible provides parsing and an abridged lexicon. (You will want to switch the Bible from ESV to THOT. You can do that manually, or click here: https://www.stepbible.org/?q=version=THOT.)

• Full versions of the standard (dated but still valuable) Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon can be searched online here:

  • http://www.2letterlookup.com/

  • http://www.ericlevy.com/revel/bdb/bdb/main.htm

(3) Read and Re-read until you can understand the text without looking up forms. I recommend a 1-2-3 reading process. For example, read Genesis 1:1-2 on day 1, Genesis 1:1-2 + 1:3-4 on day 2, and Genesis 1:3-4 + 1:5-6 on day 3. This way each reading will include review and new material.

Finally, some general advice:

• Stay humble. You have learned enough Hebrew to be dangerous.
• Be patient with yourself. There is lots more to learn.
• Form a habit. Reading a little Hebrew regularly is much better than grand ambitions that never get off the ground.
• Don’t stop.
• Have fun!

Early Judaism Video Lecture: From Alexander to Antiochus IV

This video, the fourth in a series of lectures I recorded in the fall of 2020, offers a big picture overview of Greek rule in Judaea from the death of Alexander the Great to the conquest of the Levant by the Seleucid king Antiochus III (ca. 323 BCE - 198 BCE). I also introduce the concept of “Hellenization.”

It’s riveting, I assure you, but best watched at 1.5 - 2x speed. 

See this post for more information as well as links to other video lectures in the series.

Major secondary sources / influences:

Cohen, Shaye. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. 3rd ed. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2014.

Nickelsburg, George W. E. Jewish Literature Between the Bible and the Mishnah: A Historical and Literary Introduction. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005.

Rainey, Anson F., and R. Steven Notley. The Sacred Bridge: Carta’s Atlas of the Biblical World. Jerusalem: Carta, 2006.

Schwartz, Seth. The Ancient Jews from Alexander to Muhammad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Schwartz, Seth. Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Tcherikover, Victor. Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1999.

 

On Creativity, ChatGPT, and Doing Your Chores

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I recently attended a virtual presentation by Bart Caylor on “Leveraging AI for Your Marketing and Recruitment Efforts.” Caylor’s basic message for higher education, including faculty, is: Get with the program or get left behind. Generative AI is a “neutral tool.” Everyone is using it. “Higher education has neither the ability nor the luxury to lag behind.” Luddites who try to resist the new technology are like math professors in the 1960’s protesting the use of calculators. As a fake quote attributed to Alvin Toffler puts it, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

If we don’t want to be left behind, we must pivot — unlearning and relearning — and embrace GenAI for our marketing, recruitment, leadership and teaching efforts. To be sure, there are challenges: Schools need to have a plan to respond to the inevitability of malign deep-fake videos, for instance. But there are also positive uses of deep-fake technology. Who wouldn’t want to watch a video of our college president extolling the virtues of the education we offer in flawless Russian or Klingon?

Caylor urges us to “lean into AI for chores.” Let AI do the reading, summarizing, brainstorming and speech-writing, so administrators and faculty members can focus on mentoring and relationships. AI can come up with grading rubrics too. AI-grading anyone?

In our new world, AI will take over chores that can be automated. This will mean jobs lost for people who can’t pivot fast enough. But humans will still be required to make decisions, and so Caylor envisages a “liberal arts resurgence” to help develop critical thinking skills—and this could lead to a bright future for colleges like my own.

I appreciate Caylor’s enthusiasm for the liberal arts, but I confess to wondering what he thinks it means. How does he imagine a liberal arts education will produce the creativity and critical thinking skills we need, if not by the reading and writing “chores” AI can supposedly replace?

Let me counter Caylor’s 1960’s math professor analogy with an example from sports. Attempting to outsource the “chores” of brainstorming and the hard work of crafting sentences to a large language model is like getting a robot to run your basketball drills so you can spend more time playing the game. With critical thinking as with any other skill, there is no substitute for practice. And the foundation of critical thinking is basic literacy. As David Brooks puts it:

“[L]iteracy is the backbone of reasoning ability, the source of the background knowledge you need to make good decisions in a complicated world. ... Writing is the discipline that teaches you to take a jumble of thoughts and cohere them into a compelling point of view.” 

In other words, Caylor and other AI cheerleaders miss the whole point of education. Our responsibility as teachers includes helping students learn what it means to work with their minds, and prompting them to forge the neural pathways that will enable them to think creatively and make difficult decisions. These critical thinking skills depend on the “chores” of reading and writing, and they are even more essential in a world where truth and lies are so thoroughly mixed together.

Because it offers an easy alternative to the hard work of thinking, GenAI makes the job of teaching way harder. GenAI gets in the way of learning; it stunts development. It is, in my view, a major threat to the basic literacy of reading and writing, as well as to the additional literacy of “learning how to learn” that Alvin Toffler really did call for in 1970:

“Students must learn how to discard old ideas, how and when to replace them. They must, in short, learn how to learn. ... By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education. ... Psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy of the Human Resources Research Organization phrases it simply: ‘The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction—how to teach himself. Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.’” - Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), 367.

This kind of literacy—one that assumes and builds on the literacy of reading and writing—is a pedagogical goal I can stand behind, but it is impeded not advanced by the uncritical adoption of our latest technology.

On Leisure

Alan Jacobs: “I think we’re living in the aftermath of a slow-motion cultural and moral apocalypse. I really do. I’m trying to keep some beautiful things alive for the people who are willing to encounter them and maybe even to love them.”

AKMA: “I want to note that almost everyone in today’s neoliberal economy has been squeezed for productivity like a lemon wedge until there’s little left but macerated pulp and skin. ... Everyone ought to benefit from the leisure, the slack time, that insulates workers from the parching, fraying, abrasive effects of unrelenting demands to extract more from our lives, all to the profit of the unimaginably wealthy. ... [O]ne way we can push back on this matrix of extraction can involve recognising and encouraging a clerical vocation of leisure (for the benefit of our cures, not for self-interest, though some will of course abuse that opportunity). ... Demand that real academic communities offer their teachers the time to ruminate, not just pump the human equivalent of AI slop into print month after month. ...”

Arthur C. Brooks in the Atlantic: “Leisure, in other words, is far from the modern notion of just chillin’. It is a serious business, and if you don’t do leisure well, you will never find life’s full meaning. Properly understood, leisure is the work you do for yourself as a person without an economic compulsion driving you. For Pieper, this work of leisure—no contradiction, in his view—would not involve such ‘acediac’ activities as scrolling social media and chuckling at memes, getting drunk, or binge-streaming some show. Rather, true leisure would involve philosophical reflection, deep artistic experiences, learning new ideas or skills, spending time in nature, or deepening personal relationships. ... Left to our educational experience and its basic assumptions, many of us naturally oscillate between being Homo economicus and Homo trivialus—in other words, a cycle of laborious slog by day and unproductive, numbing pleasure-pursuits in the evenings and at weekends. This is a culture of unenriching, unrelieved monotony. We have two ways to change this: One is through work; the other is through leisure. For many people, the former is not possible, at least not in the short run. But for everyone, leisure can be customized to make it enlivening, not deadening. How you use your leisure can be made to reflect your values and connect with other people in deeply meaningful ways.”

Great minds think alike.

Early Judaism Video Lectures

Five years ago, the college where I teach responded to the Covid pandemic by radically altering our regular semester schedule. To ensure flexibility in case an outbreak meant we had to switch everything online, our fourteen-week semester was divided into two more intensive seven-week terms, with daily classes but shorter class times to satisfy our Province’s restrictions on in-person meetings. (Chairs also had to be six feet apart, which meant that those of us with larger classes had to teach multiple sections.) Thankfully, we were still able to meet in person, students were obviously glad to be there, and the smaller class sizes and more intensive format helped contribute to the learning experience.

The big challenge for those of us who teach content-heavy courses was making up for lost lecture time. To solve this problem we were encouraged to “flip” our class format by pre-recording lectures and saving face-to-face class time for discussion. I have to say I hated this. The videos took an enormous amount of work, and the quality of what I produced was, I thought, very poor. 

In subsequent years, however, I have found myself returning to the videos I produced for my 300-level introduction to early Judaism course (“Jewish Backgrounds to Early Christianity”), sometimes to remind myself what I said in class and sometimes to require my students to watch specific videos as assigned “readings” when we get behind or to leave more room for discussion in class. 

The first few videos are indeed a wash. I won’t be posting them anywhere! But the quality does improve, the content is, I think, pretty good, and, if you speed up the video to at least 1.5x speed, you can get beyond my stilted delivery. It occurred to me that there might be some value in posting some of them to my YouTube channel and linking to them on this blog. 

I intend to keep this post updated as an index page as I upload more videos:

• From Alexander to Antiochus IV - A big picture overview of Greek rule in Judaea from ca. 323 BCE - 198 BCE, with a discussion of “Hellenization.”
• Purity and Impurity in Second Temple Judaism - This video, from about two-thirds of the way through the course, is on the ancient Jewish purity system. As it happens, I originally created a blog post about the video back in 2020. That post has been updated with a link to the YouTube version of the video. As I mention there, anyone interested in the topic should now subscribe to Logan Williams’ and Paul Sloan’s excellent “Jesus and Jewish Law” podcast.

Remembering Carl Conrad

Members of the B-Greek forum have been posting tributes in memory of Carl Conrad, the forum's long-time co-moderator, who passed away on February 20th at the age of 90:

AKMA: "Carl was a mighty man of old of the B-Greek mailing list, back when it was strictly a mailing list, and we all learned much from him — many of us about Greek, but all of us about how to conduct ourselves with grace and patience in a mixed group of international scholars, intermediate and beginning students, autodidact experts, axe-grinding non-experts, and wayfaring strangers. ... I know my colleagues all well enough; I can estimate what they might say, how they’re likely to respond to an argument. I never dared assume I could anticipate what Carl would make of my ideas, not because he was arbitrary or capricious, but because his judgement was so much more richly funded with knowledge of the texts and with the experience of worked through them and taught them so fully and carefully. I'm surrounded by great classicists here [at Oxford], all of them erudite and judicious. And I still think of Carl as my Greek-analytical conscience."

Steve Runge: "His insights regularly filled in gaps, highlighted broader patterns, or shattered ill-formed ideas (including mine), always in the name of deepening our understanding of and appreciation for ancient Greek. I came to rely on his instincts as an early sanity check or corrective for the discourse features I sought to describe. He was one of the loudest voices in my head when I wrote. ... His persistence, curiosity, attention to detail, patience, respect for those with whom he disagreed, incredible memory, and an insatiable thirst to learn indelibly shaped my understanding of what it means to be a scholar."

Randy Leedy: "The unflagging persistence with which he responded to nearly every imaginable question on B-Greek is a tribute to his dedication as a teacher. Those who did not know the forum during its heydey probably can't imagine the workload that his fully engaged participation entailed. And if you knew Carl, you know that his replies were not terse: he regularly expanded the discussion into realms that the questioner had not even been aware of but that were important for adequate perspective to understand the fullest possible answer that Carl wanted to provide. The hours required for such thoughtful interaction with such a large number of discussions must have mounted well beyond 10,000--likely double that--over the years. All free of charge, as a public service, out of his love for the language and its students."

Jonathan Robie: "Carl welcomed me graciously, answered my questions, suggested better ways to go about studying the language, and even putting me in contact with other people who could help. I never felt like he was talking down to me. He was always the consummate teacher, taking the time to understand how I was thinking about something before suggesting other ways that might be more helpful. For me, that was at least as important as his vast knowledge and deep intuitive grasp of the Greek language."

I first encountered Carl when I joined the B-Greek email list (as it was then) as a young seminary student. (I am still embarrassed by my claim to be a "Greek scholar" on a survey Carl conducted in 1997.) A short while later I came across a reference to Carl's unpublished Harvard PhD dissertation from 1964, which seemed like a long time ago, though it is now almost as long since I joined the list!

Carl's "Observations on Ancient Greek Voice" (originally posted to the list in 1997) anticipated a spate of publications on the subject by others in the early 2000's and shaped my own thinking on the topic. His enthusiasm for a living approach to learning ancient Greek served as strong validation for those of us "Little Greeks" moving in that direction.