A bestselling historian uncovers the surprising roots of America's long alliance with Israel and its troubling consequences
Fights about the fate of the state of Israel, and the Zionist movement that gave birth to it, have long been a staple of both Jewish and American political culture. But despite these arguments' significance to American politics, American Jewish life, and to Israel itself, no one has ever systematically examined their history and explained why they matter.
In We Are Not One, historian Eric Alterman traces this debate from its nineteenth-century origins. Following Israel's 1948-1949 War of Independence (called the 'nakba' or 'catastrophe' by Palestinians), few Americans, including few Jews, paid much attention to Israel or the challenges it faced. Following the 1967 Six-Day War, however, almost overnight support for Israel became the primary component of American Jews' collective identity. Over time, Jewish organizations joined forces with conservative Christians and neoconservative pundits and politicos to wage a tenacious fight to define Israel's image in the United States media, popular culture, Congress, and college campuses. Deeply researched, We Are Not One reveals how our consensus on Israel and Palestine emerged and why, today, it is fracturing.
This definitive history of presidential lying reveals how our standards for truthfulness have eroded -- and why Trump's lies are especially dangerous.
If there's one thing we know about Donald Trump, it's that he lies. But he's by no means the first president to do so. In Lying in State, Eric Alterman asks how we ended up with such a pathologically dishonest commander in chief, showing that, from early on, the United States has persistently expanded its power and hegemony on the basis of presidential lies. He also reveals the cumulative effect of this deception-each lie a president tells makes it more acceptable for subsequent presidents to lie-and the media's complicity in spreading misinformation. Donald Trump, then, represents not an aberration but the culmination of an age-old trend.
Full of vivid historical examples and trenchant analysis, Lying in State is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how we arrived in this age of alternative facts.
Thanks to the machinations of the right, there is no dirtier word in American politics today than "liberal." Yet public-opinion polls consistently show that the majority of Americans hold liberal views on everything from health care to foreign policy.
In this feisty, accessible primer, Eric Alterman sets out to restore liberalism to its rightful honored place as the politics of America's everyday citizens. In a crisply argued and extensively documented counterattack on right-wing spin and misinformation, Alterman briskly disposes of such canards as "Liberals Hate God" and "Liberals Are Soft on Terrorism," reclaiming liberalism from the false definitions foisted upon it.
Why We're Liberals is the perfect book for all of those ready to fight back against the conservative mud-slinging machine and claim their voice in the political debate.
Not since Richard Nixon's heyday has there been a more controversial president capable of polarizing public opinion than George W. Bush. From his arrival in office through what many still regard as one of the most flagrant miscarriages of electoral justice in modern history to the long road to Iraq, liberals have vilified Bush as ardently as neoconservatives have embraced him. Both Alterman and Green are known for their doggedness in researching the media and political figures, and what they discover in the case of Bush is a consistent pattern of double standards, misrepresentation, and contradictions. The Book on Bush methodically critiques Administration policy from the standpoint of its truthfulness as well as its merit, with the characteristic wit of both writers.
"Examining the Bush administration's record on domestic and foreign policy issues, Alterman and former New York City public advocate Green see a pattern of dissimulation to promote the interests of the religious right, big business and neoconservative radicals. The two progressive champions make no effort to hide their dislike of Bush, branding him an 'affirmative-action-legacy student' lacking knowledge and brain power...Expect liberal cognoscenti to back this book in droves."--Publishers Weekly
Bernard Goldberg, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O'Reilly to name only three have had their day on bestseller lists exposing the alleged buffoonery and incompetence of the so-called liberal media. Until now, not a single journalist has undertaken an investigation, let alone a refutation, of the myth that the mainstream media slants the news to the left, thereby duping the American public and keeping it ignorant of the truth about the world in which we live.
In What Liberal Media? Eric Alterman takes these accusations seriously and in brisk, light-hearted prose exposes the fallacy of the vast left-wing conspiracy that never was. Starting from the fundamental position that the media is neither the conservative monolith nor the liberal majority that many make it out to be, Alterman lays out a surprising defense of the media as it now stands. It isn't individual journalists who dictate the news, he claims, but rather the corporate news structure--be it television or print--that determines what we see and read. This very structure, much more than the personal idealogies of prominent news figures, defines the current state of the media--one that Alterman describes as more conservatively oriented than critics on the right are willing to admit.
Armed with data that debunk many of the more inflammatory accusations made against the media and expose just who controls the purse strings of the press, What Liberal Media? is a must-hear for all those outraged, confused, or just plain disgused at the current critical stalemate about who the media serves and why it exists.
