THE COMPLETION OF THIS MANUSCRIPT was facilitated by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, the Humanities Research Fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley, and the Mellon Foundation’s Award for Distinguished Scholarship in the Humanities. I benefited enormously from conversations with a number of colleagues, many of whom read or heard versions of chapters over the several years in which this text took form. My views were not always theirs, but their views mattered to me as I wrote, and I tried my best to engage them. They include Jacqueline Rose, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Samera Esmeir, Michel Feher, Etienne Balibar, Idith Zertal, Saba Mahmood, Joan W. Scott, Wendy Brown, Anat Matar, and Amy Hollywood. I thank my students at the European Graduate School and UC Berkeley for engaging the work on Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin in seminars. I have also learned from students and faculty at Birkbeck College, Birzeit University, Université Paris–VII, New York University, Dartmouth College, Pomona College, and Columbia University, where I presented portions of this work, and from conversations with Omar Barghouti, Joelle Marelli, Tal Dor, Manal Al Tamimi, Beshara Doumani, Mandy Merck, Lynne Segal, Udi Aloni, Leticia Sabsay, Kim Sang Ong Van Cung, Alexander Chasin, and Frances Bartkowski. I thank Amy Jamgochian, Colleen Pearl, and Damon Young for their indispensable assistance with the manuscript. And I am most grateful to both Susan Pensak and Wendy Lochner from Columbia University Press for seeing this text through to completion, even when I balked.
Although some of the chapters are drawn from existing publications, they were all reworked for publication here. Both the introduction and chapter 1 are drawn from two sources: “Jews and the Binational Vision,” in Logos 3, no. 1 (Winter 2004), after it was presented at the Second International Conference on an End to Occupation, a Just Peace in Israel-Palestine: Towards an Active International Network in East Jerusalem, January 4–5, 2004; “The Impossible Demand: Levinas and Said,” in Mitaam 10 (2007), which was presented first for the Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Princeton University in 2006. Chapter 2 draws upon a shorter essay that appeared as “Être en relation avec autrui face à face, c’est ne pas pouvoir tuer,” in Bruno Clément and Danielle Cohn-Levinas, eds., Emmanuel Levinas et les territoires de la pensée, through Epimethée, a series with Presses Universitaires de France, 2007. Chapter 3 is a revised version of “Critique, Coercion, and the Sacred Life of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence,’” first published in Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan, eds., Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). Chapter 5 recasts arguments about Hannah Arendt I made first in a review of Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Writings entitled ‘“‘I merely belong to them’” in the London Review of Books 29, no. 9 (May 10, 2007): 26–30, incorporating a substantial part of my argument from “Is Judaism Zionism?” published in The Power of Religion in Public Life, with Cornell West, Jürgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Chapter 7 is a revised version of “Primo Levi for the Present” that first appeared in Frank Ankerschmitt, ed., Refiguring Hayden White (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). Chapter 8 was first presented as the Edward Said Memorial Lecture at the American University of Cairo in October 2010 and will appear simultaneously in ALIF: Journal of Comparative Poetics 32 (2012).