Coercive Environments

Second Temple, and one of Judaism’s qualities,whichdistinguishesitfrommost forms of Christianity, is its statelessness. To Rabkin and many of the thinkers he quotes, entangling religion with a political enterprise is just not Judaism’s “thing” because it necessarily involves a debasement of religion. Of course, the idealofseparating church and state is elusive becausewhenthestateinsists on separating itself from this particular church or that one, it sometimes can end up becoming a church itself. Rabkin’s book focuses on this problem in a constructive way. Particularly to American Jews who have been educated to believe that supporting the State of Israel is a religious duty, this book offers a different and very valuable perspective. I Rafael Chodos is a lawyer and the author of The Law of Fiduciary Duties and many other books and articles. He is the CEO of Giotto Multimedia and founder of The Foundation for Centripetal Art. COERCIVE ENVIRONMENTS YOUTHINASUSPECTSOCIETY:DEMOCRACY ORDISPOSABILITY byHenryGiroux PalgraveMacMillan,2009 ReviewbyBillYousman E ducation. Consumerism. Incarceration. Henry Giroux’s new book identifies these as three key forces in binding contemporary youth to the social structures of neoliberalism . A classroom, a prison cell, and a shoppingmallmayatfirstglanceseemlike unrelated environments, but when surveyed through the lens of critical cultural studies,theyappearintimatelyconnected. Eachisasitewhereyoungpeoplearecommonly found in large numbers. More importantly, however, all three locations are, in more or less obvious ways, coercive environments. In many ways the value of critical cultural studies—a discipline that emerged in the 1960s at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England, and went on to become a revolutionary paradigm in the humanities—lies in its ability to uncover andrevealtheconnectionsbetweenseemingly disparate social and cultural phenomena. By applying critical cultural studies’analyticlens,Girouxrevealssome startling truths about the forces shaping young people’s lives. The title of his latest book, Youth in a Suspect Society, functions as a double entendre, signifying both how market societies treat young people as suspects and how it is the neoliberal social formation itself that should be considered suspect, as the forces of capital accumulationandgreedhaverunamok ,unchecked by any notions of empathy or compassion for the weak or disadvantaged. Throughout Giroux’s prolific career (he has already authored, coauthored, or edited over forty books), certain concerns have always been at the forefront: youth, pedagogy, media and culture, race and racism, and the abuses of corporate and state power. Working in the Freireian tradition of critical pedagogy, Giroux has been one of the most powerful dissenting voices in education and cultural studies since he published his first books in the early 1980s. In his latest work he offers four cogent essays, the first three dealing with the commodification of youth culture , the criminalization of youth, and both neoliberal and conservative attacks on higher education, an institution that serves as one of the last refuges for democratic discourse and critical thinking about modern-day capitalism. The final essay ties the three previous interventions together through an analysis of the terror of neoliberalism and the havoc it has wrought upon young people, people of color, and the poor and working class. Giroux convincingly demonstrates how, under neoliberalism, both the market and the state treat youth as nothing more than disposable objects. From the thevolumesoftheTalmud.Tothem,Zionism was the way the Jewish people could take its place among the other peoples of the world and stand tall. By forming a real nationstate , the Jewish people would free itself from the “yoke of the heavenly kingdom.” Many of the founders of the State of Israel were largely unfamiliar with Jewish tradition and cared very little for it, just as many contemporary Israelis have neither patience with the Orthodox Jews who live among them, nor any knowledge ofthetraditionthattheyclaimtouphold. Rabkin is clearly striving for academic rigor and historical objectivity, and his book is sophisticated and well-researched. Even so, the author’s bias shows through. I mentionthisnottocriticizethebookbutto highlight one of its virtues; by arguing his points, Rabkin persuades us to take a deeperlookatZionismbyshowingushow much propaganda and distortion of the truthwasinvolvedinthefoundationofthe StateofIsrael. Rabkin’s book also dramatizes the painful irony woven into Judaism’s very DNA: the Torah’s whole narrative about the Exodus from Egypt and the establishment of the Kingdom of Israel in the “PromisedLand”isitselfaprototypeofthe...