I remember reading Joel Schalit’s columns in Punk Planet as a teenager. A longtime writer for zines and independent magazines (he was editor of the great zine Bad Subjects), Schalit has moved on to author and edit books, including Jerusalem Calling and The Anti-Capitalism Reader.
On Monday, November 9th Schalit will be at Powell’s Book @ Cedar Hills Crossing in Beaverton to read from Israel vs. Utopia, a new collection of essays about America’s controversial political involvement in the Middle East.
From Akashic, the book publisher:
In his new book, Israel Vs. Utopia, Israeli American journalist Joel Schalit distinguishes between the Israel he knows, and the image of it that exists in the imagination of Americans. Israel is a state of mind, Schalit argues, as much as it is its own sovereign state. Exploring this tension, in America, in Israel, employing a combination of personal observation, political, and cultural commentary, Schalit defines the instability of Israel, as a metaphor, and America’s troubled love for it, as only an Israeli American would know.