Author: Michael R. Fischbach File Type: pdf The 1967 ArabIsraeli War rocketed the question of Israel and Palestine onto the front pages of American newspapers. Black Power activists saw Palestinians as a kindred people of color, waging the same struggle for freedom and justice as themselves. Soon concerns over the ArabIsraeli conflict spread across mainstream black politics and into the heart of the civil rights movement itself. Black Power and Palestine uncovers why so many African Americansnotably Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali, among otherscame to support the Palestinians or felt the need to respond to those who did. Americans first heard pro-Palestinian sentiments in public through the black freedom struggle of the 1960s and 1970s. Michael R. Fischbach uncovers this hidden history of the ArabIsraeli conflicts role in African American activism and the ways that distant struggle shaped the domestic fight for racial equality. Black Powers transnational connections between African Americans and Palestinians deeply affected U.S. black politics, animating black visions of identity well into the late 1970s. Black Power and Palestine allows those black voices to be heard again today. In chronicling this story, Fischbach reveals much about how American peoples of color create political strategies, a sense of self, and a place within U.S. and global communities. The shadow cast by events of the 1960s and 1970s continues to affect the United States in deep, structural ways. This is the first book to explore how conflict in the Middle East shaped the American civil rights movement. **

Author: Morris Berman File Type: epub Amazon.com ReviewIf you have finally had it with CNN and Hollywood and John Grisham and New Age spirituality, then pull up a chair, unplug your phone (beeper, TV, fax machine, computer, etc.), and give me a few hours of your time. I promise to do my best not to entertain you.A slightly forbidding introduction to a book, but indicative of its authors disgust at the homogenized McWorld in which we live, and an enticing challenge to read on. As the title The Twilight of American Culture suggests, Morris Bermans outlook is somewhat bleak. Analogizing the contemporary United States to the late Roman Empire, Berman sees a nation fat on useless consumption, saturated with corporate ideology, and politically, psychically, and culturally dulled. But he believes that this behemoth--what Thomas Frank called the multinational entertainment oligopoly--must buckle under its own weight. His hope for a brighter tomorrow lies in a modern monastic movement, in which keepers of the enlightenment flame resist the constant barrage of spin and hype. Ironically, despite his disdain for the fashionable patois of postmodernism, he approvingly quotes poststructuralist theorist Jean-Francois Lyotards maxim elitism for everybody in describing this cadre of idiosyncratic, literate devotees, these new monks.Berman is plainspoken and occasionally caustic. The Twilight of American Culture is an informed and thought-provoking book, a wake-up call to a nation whose powerful minority has become increasingly self-satisfied as their stock options ripen, while an underclass that vastly outnumbers the e-generation withers on the vine and cannot locate itself on any map. It is a quick and savage read that aims to get your eyes off this computer, your nose out of that self-help book, and send you back to thought and action. --J.R.From Publishers WeeklyAmerican culture is in crisis, argues Berman, pointing out that millions of high school graduates can barely read or write common words are misspelled on public signs most Americans grow old in isolation, zoning out in front of TV screens and 40% of American adults [do] not know that Germany was our enemy in World War II--never mind that most students dont even want to learn Greek or Latin. Bermans lament that like ancient Rome [American culture] is drifting into an increasingly dysfunctional situation at first makes his book seem like a neoconservative treatise along the lines of the late Allan Blooms The Closing of the American Mind. But Berman, who teaches in the liberal arts masters program at Johns Hopkins University, doesnt locate the cause of this malaise in multiculturalism or postmodernism, as Bloom did (although he is no fan of either one), but rather in the increasing dominance of corporate culture and the global economy, which he claims creates a homogenous business and consumer culture that disdains art, beauty, literature, critical thinking and the principles of the Enlightenment. Bermans provocative remedy is to urge individuals who are appalled by this McWorld to become sacredsecular humanist monks who renounce commercial slogans and the fashionable patois of postmodernism and pursue Enlightenment values. While Bermans eclectic approach often makes for engaging reading, his quirky and almost completely theoretical solutions are unlikely to galvanize many readers. Agent, Candice Fuhrman. (June) 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.