Between Jew and Arab

by David N. Myers

"This book brings new attention to Simon Rawidowicz (1897-1957), the wide-ranging Jewish thinker and scholar who taught at Brandeis University in the 1950s. At the heart of Myers' book is a chapter that Rawidowicz wrote as a coda to his Hebrew tome Babylon and Jerusalem (1957) but never published. In this coda, Rawidowicz shifted his decades-long preoccupation with the "Jewish Question" to what he Called the "Arab Question." Asserting that the "Arab Question" had become a most urgent political and moral matter for Jews after 1948, Rawidowicz called for an end to discrimination against Arabs resident in Israel - and more provocatively, for the repatriation of Arab refugees from 1948." "Myers' book is divided into two main sections. Part I introduces the life and intellectual development of Rawidowicz. It traces the evolution of his thinking about the "Jewish Question," namely, the status of Jews as a national minority in the Diaspora. Part II concentrates on the shift occasioned by the