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Review: If I Am Not For Myself: Journey Of An Anti-Zionist Jew

April 3, 2008 23:00
1 min read

By Mike Marqusee
Verso, £16.88

This provocative book is a mixture of family biography, travel journal and anti-Zionist polemic. All these narratives are subsumed in the dominant presence of the author’s grandfather Edward V Morand — EVM.

This huge personality was a writer, lawyer, political activist, militant Jew, anti-fascist, anti-racist and champion of black civil rights. Towards the end of his life, he asked his grandson to write his biography. This book partly fulfils that request but is also a trajectory from one man’s conscience to another’s.

The central conflict stems from EVM’s support for Israel’s cause in 1948 and, in 2008, his grandson’s questioning of the need for a Jewish state. There is a deep moral stand underlying all this. EVM could not extend his feelings for injustice against blacks in the US towards the Palestinians. In examining this, Marqusee traces his own path to anti-Zionism. Structurally, the work is a mix of personal memory, history and political analysis written in an idiosyncratic style which takes time to absorb. The spine of the story is Marqusee’s political linking between three male generations.