Susie Linfield Journalist Profile

Articles

Jewish Indigeneity to the Land of Israel

1 month ago | fathomjournal.org | Alan Johnson |Matti Friedman |Susie Linfield |John Strawson

Ben Freeman writes about his recent book, The Jews: An Indigenous People. While our primary concern is how we understand ourselves, Freeman writes, indigeneity also offers a way for the wider world to comprehend our experience and identity. The Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel. My new book, The Jews: An Indigenous People (released on February 27, 2025), presents the first-ever scholarly work to conclusively prove this.
A Kinder, Gentler Eliminationism

2 months ago | quillette.com | Susie Linfield |Samuel Kronen |Jonathan Rauch |Jonathan Kay

A review of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning by Peter Beinart, 172 pages (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, January 2025)In Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, Peter Beinart urges Jewsâpleads with Jewsâto reconnect to our tradition of universalist justice as articulated in the Bible and the Talmud.
Shakespeare Versus the Girlboss

Jan 15, 2025 | quillette.com | Marilyn Simon |Sean Welsh |Jeffrey Herf |Susie Linfield

Back in 1979, historian Christopher Lasch warned that a crisis of narcissism was about to consume our culture because self-referential thinking and feeling were being championed as ethical, effective, and equitable. His book The Culture of Narcissism provides an archaeology of how we got to where we are now, 45 years later. Behind the narcissistic impulse, he wrote, lies a desire to soothe emotional frustration and erase cognitive tension.
Jihadist at a Crossroads

Jan 15, 2025 | quillette.com | Sean Welsh |Jeffrey Herf |Susie Linfield

The fall of Syria’s Ba’athist regime has been a strategic setback for authoritarian Russia, theocratic Iran, and (most obviously) the Assad dictatorship itself. But the big winner in Syria was not liberal democracy, it was jihadism. Just twelve days after the attack on Aleppo on 27 November, Syria’s mujahideen were already in the capital. Before his triumphant arrival in Damascus, most of the world regarded Abu Mohammed al-Jolani and his Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) organisation as terrorists.
Agitprop at the AHA

Jan 14, 2025 | quillette.com | Jeffrey Herf |Susie Linfield |Samuel Veissière

On 5 January 2025, at a business meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) held in New York City, the assembled members voted 428 to 88 in favour of a “resolution to oppose scholasticide in Gaza.” The resolution had been proposed by an organisation of left-wing historians calling themselves Historians for Peace and Democracy (HPD).
Syrian Torture, Then and Now

Jan 14, 2025 | quillette.com | Susie Linfield |Samuel Veissière |Claire Lehmann

Newspapers, television stations, and social-media accounts worldwide have been filled with news of Bashar al-Assad’s gulag of torture centres since the dictator fled and his regime collapsed on 8 December.
Review | On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

Jun 25, 2024 | fathomjournal.org | Alan Johnson |John Strawson |Susie Linfield |Joshua Brook

Palestine is Everywhere‘Palestine is everywhere’ proclaimed a window-sign I saw on a recent visit to Brooklyn. What could this possibly mean? As a matter of geography, it is obviously incorrect — Palestine is not everywhere; it is in the southern Levant.
From The River To The Sea

Apr 23, 2024 | salmagundi.skidmore.edu | Susie Linfield

ROBERT BOYERS: You’ve had much to say about Israel and Zionism over many years, especially in your book, The Lion’s Den: Zionism & The Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky. More recently, in November of 2023, you published a provocative essay on “The Return of the Progressive Atrocity,” which was a fierce denunciation of the reaction by much of the global Left to the Hamas attacks, a reaction you decried as a kind of moral rot that had been years in the making. The essay has circulated widely.
What’s in a Face? | Susie Linfield

Apr 18, 2024 | nybooks.com | Susie Linfield

Recently, when friends have asked what I am working on and I’ve told them that I am reviewing a British photo-essay book called What Does a Jew Look Like?, they have reacted with a nervous giggle. This has sometimes been followed by “Wow!,” “Oy,” or an ominous “Uh-oh.” The uneasiness stems, I think, from the question itself, not its possible answers.
Root-Causism - SAPIR Journal

Mar 18, 2024 | sapirjournal.org | Susie Linfield

Immediately after news of Hamas’s October 7 massacres broke — before it was known just what had happened, before the shock of the cruelty had been absorbed (which will, perhaps, never happen) — instant, and astonishingly confident, analyses of the event’s “root cause” emerged.