ABSTRACT
Let me save us some time: I may well be in the process of becoming what, in a recent issue of the journal Controverses, has been called an “alterjuif” (“alterJew”). It is not entirely clear what an alterJew is, but the alterJews portrayed in Controverses are diasporic Jewish intellectuals who have grown less and less comfortable with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and who publicly say so. Today, as much perhaps as in 1982 (the date of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon), I also fi nd it hard to be “Jewish” in relation to what the Jewish state has shaped that to mean and to feel good about myself.
