Queering Anti-Zionism

Queering Anti-Zionism is an important corrective to the Manichaean view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has overtaken queer academia. Corinne Blackmer challenges point-by-point the oversimplifications, false equivalencies, and misrepresentations presented by leading queer critics of Zionism; she offers in their place a balanced and informed understanding of the complexities of the conflict. This is a brave and very necessary book.

~Lillian Faderman, Author of Naked in the Promised Land, My Mother's Wars, and Woman: the American History of an Idea

After being maliciously attacked as a lesbian and a Jewish-Zionist, Corinne Blackmer set out to write about how the BDS—Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement is damaging the field of queer studies. The result is an engaging book which offers valuable insight into how this discipline has become a breeding ground for repellent ideologies and propaganda that contradict postmodernist positions, fail to do justice by Palestinian LGBTQ individuals, stymie efforts to foster Israeli-Palestinian mutual understanding and coexistence, and ostracize and marginalize Jews.

~Miriam F. Elman, Associate Professor of Political Science, Syracuse University, and Executive Director, Academic Engagement Network

Corinne Blackmer offers a powerful narrative about the destructive force of identity politics. It draws too tight a circle around the words and people allowed to enter its sacred struggle for social justice. And no entry to Zionists fuels a concoction of distortions about Israeli history and society.

~Donna Robinson Divine, Morningstar Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Government Emerita, Smith College

Corinne Blackmer exposes the ways in which prominent academics have once again placed their ideological ambitions (i.e., anti-Zionism) above empirical evidence. Her book recalls the ground-breaking work of physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, who exposed the misrepresentation of scientific concepts by prominent postmodern thinkers in their aptly titled, Fashionable Nonsense. Queering Anti-Zionism similarly reveals the misappropriation of human rights discourse by celebrated academics who often willfully display a profound indifference to facts and logic. Scholars and students who have been steeped in or exposed to queer theory will find refuge in and/or lively engagement with this eloquent work.

~R. Amy Elman, Professor of Political Science, Kalamazoo College, and Author of the European Union, Antisemitism and the Politics of Denial and Sexual Equality in an Integrated Europe