Benjamin Moser > Quotes

“I studied mathematics which is the madness of reason.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“As time goes by, especially in the last few years, I’ve lost the knack of being a person. I no longer know how one is supposed to be. And an entirely new kind of ‘solitude of not belonging’ has started invading me like ivy on a wall.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“Clarice scrawled, 'A question from when I was a little girl that I can answer only now: are rocks made, or are they born? Answer: rocks are.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“Vocation is different from talent. One can have vocation and not have talent; one can be called and not know how to go.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“Everything touches me—I see too much, I hear too much, everything demands too much of me.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“There is no right to punish. There is only the power to punish,' she wrote. 'A man is punished for his crime because the State is stronger than he; the great crime of War is not punished because beyond the individual there is mankind, and beyond mankind there is nothing at all.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“A little girl's fantasies are one thing, and literature is another; just as numbers require rules to give them human meaning, words, too, demand a form to turn them into literature.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“The political Zionists yearn for a land upon which our kings trod, whereas our nation yearns for the land upon which our prophets trod.”
― Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

“Capitalist, racist Europe exported its Jewish problem, freeing itself at the same time from the weight and the guilt accumulated in years of discrimination. By exporting its problem, it created another far worse one.”
― Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

“Modern nations busy themselves in matters of civilization and social welfare with great hullabaloo: they sow and plant, build bridges, pave highways, manufacture, make fairs, etc. But the motivating spirit of all these activities is the lowest kind of egotism. All these occupations and activities are undertaken solely in the heated pursuit of wealth, possessions, and careers.”
― Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

“Escondida atrás dos dançantes ritmos africanos do samba, jaz uma melancolia que não é tão evidente como no tango argentino ou na rancheira mexicana. Para alguém que não entende as letras, esse pesar quase certamente passará despercebido - do contrário fica claro de imediato quão diferente a tristeza brasileira é da saudade que impregna o fado português. Portugal, Argentina e México nunca parecem felizes. O Brasil, sim. E o Brasil é um dos lugares mais tristes que há.
(...) Seus pais fundadores - os portugueses exilados, os africanos escravizados, os índios expropriados - tinham razão para estar tristes.”
― Benjamin Moser, Autoimperialismo

“Why this entire country should be promised to a rather minor political movement is one of the mysteries of modern history. The Zionists represented almost nobody, and did not have so much as an office: The Zionist Federation was run out of people’s apartments.”
― Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

“The story of the expulsion of the Jews had the added convenience of shifting the consequences of the Holocaust from the Europeans, who had carried out the genocide, to the Arabs, who had not: that is, sending the Arabs the bill for European crimes.”
― Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

“Normalization often appears in the guise of “dialogue.” It reinforces the idea, popular among Western liberals, that there are two equal parties, as in a war between states. It obscures the correct understanding, which is that there is an occupier and a people under occupation.”
― Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

“The Jerusalem of which he dreamed had become “loud, hateful,” and the cause for which he had left his own country seemed boundlessly more tawdry than anything he could have imagined. “Zionism is a beautiful ideal,” he wrote. “So is socialism. Both have fallen into the hands of hustlers who do nothing for truth and ideals and everything for propaganda.”
― Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

“Brasília é, na verdade, paisagem. "Se tirassem meu retrato em pé em Brasilia, quando revelassem a fotografia só sairia a paisagem", escreveu Clarice Lispector num famoso ensaio sobre a capital; e, de fato, a paisagem é tão opressora que encontrar-se preso em todo esse espaço é tão aterrorizante quanto ficar trancado numa sala pequena sem janelas.”
― Benjamin Moser, Autoimperialismo

“Those reading her dispatches closely would have seen one thing clearly—and, when read another half century of bloodletting and misery later, poignantly. That is that the Palestinians, so persistently caricatured as Jew-hating rejectionists, were neither antisemitic nor opposed to some proposal that would have allowed the two peoples to live side by side.”
― Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

“But as Nasser was remaking Egypt, Israel delivered another blow to Egypt’s Jews. As in 1950 and 1951, when the Iraqi Jews were bombed by Zionist agents, Israel launched Operation Susannah, later known as the Lavon Affair, in 1954.”
― Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

“Arendt adumbrated the pariah’s qualities, which she saw as the positive qualities of the Jews—“kindness, freedom from prejudice, sensitiveness to injustice,” “the ‘Jewish heart,’ humanity, humor, disinterested intelligence,” “fraternity”—the same qualities that had given certain Jews their vigor, wrote the historian Enzo”
― Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

“A ameaça, no Brasil, era sempre interna. (..) A polícia invadia as favelas; os favelados invadiam as praias; os agricultores sem terra invadiam fazendas' fazendeiros invadiam reservas ambientais; colonos invadiam reservas indígenas. A invasão incessante explicava por que os brasileiros morriam numa quantidade que, na maioria dos países, só seria atingida pelo rastro de uma terrível epidemia - ou por uma guerra feroz contra um adversário estrangeiro. O Brasil invadia-se a si mesmo.”
― Benjamin Moser, Autoimperialismo

“It was an uncomfortable fact, lavishly documented, that Nazis and Zionists shared many views. First among these was a racial idea of the Jews, the same idea that the Reform Jews, the Orthodox, and many others had so strenuously rejected from”
― Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

“Sadiq Saad chronicles the elaborate ways that the Palestinians were forced to pay for their own dispossession—”
― Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

“Violating the commandment that the Jew be “bashful, compassionate, and charitable” was an offense to God, and also to men: in this case, to the Palestinians.”
― Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

“In 1918, following the Balfour Declaration, the president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations rejected, at Chicago, the idea that “Palestine is to be a national home-land for the Jewish people.”
― Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

“Yet when Eichmann in Jerusalem is read through the lens of Zionist collaboration, it becomes a shocking, explosive, damning document, and one can only agree with the Zionists who felt it was an attack on the very foundations of Zionism.”
― Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

“During World War I, Baghdad was one-third Jewish, a higher percentage than even New York. Twenty-five years later, the Iraqi Jews were gone.”
― Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

“That we totally disapprove of any attempt for the establishment of a Jewish state. Such attempts show a misunderstanding of Israel’s mission, which”
― Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

“Sitting on the porch of his house in Greenside, in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs, I recognize an intonation, a warmth, a mischievous humor that could only be Jewish. More than that, I recognize a steeliness in his eyes, a determination I’ve seen in many Jews in the face of cruelty and injustice. His opposition to Zionism has left him isolated from a South African Jewish community that is much diminished”
― Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

“In 1938, the Zionists therefore blocked a plan to bring twenty thousand Jewish children to the United States. The Ha’avara Agreement made sure that a German Jew “could not save himself with any of his assets unless he did so through Palestine.”
― Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

“You know you are in the presence of a great subject when it raises more questions than answers: and when you realize that the subject gets bigger the more you learn about it - that the more you learn, the more ignorant you start to feel.”
― Benjamin Moser, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters