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A review by howdyhoward
A Land With a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism by Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, Esther Farmer, Sarah Sills
4.0
I didn't expect the first almost 30% of this book to be a history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, but I'm really glad it was included. This was one of the most succinct and scorching accounts I've read and it taught me a lot about Jewish immigration to Israel/Palestine, especially the treatment of racialized Jews who were used to bolster the Jewish population and then discarded and mistreated because they were not Ashkenazi. This collection is worth it for this history section alone and it brought my enjoyment of it up significantly.
The introduction/history as well as the appendices and timelines at the back take up approximately 50% of this already very short book, leaving only about 90 pages for 30 essays, stories, and poems. This meant that many of the essays were quite short and to me felt surface level. I wish a lot of the essays had taken more time to expand their points and dig deeper. My favorite essays by far were the few that were longer than just a few pages. I think this collection suffered from being so short, and should either have included less authors, or simply allowed for a longer collection altogether.
The introduction/history as well as the appendices and timelines at the back take up approximately 50% of this already very short book, leaving only about 90 pages for 30 essays, stories, and poems. This meant that many of the essays were quite short and to me felt surface level. I wish a lot of the essays had taken more time to expand their points and dig deeper. My favorite essays by far were the few that were longer than just a few pages. I think this collection suffered from being so short, and should either have included less authors, or simply allowed for a longer collection altogether.