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JERUSALEM CALLING by Joel Schalit

JERUSALEM CALLING

A Homeless Conscience in a Post-Everything World

by Joel Schalit

Pub Date: Feb. 1st, 2001
ISBN: 1-888451-17-3
Publisher: Akashic

Four scattershot essays from Punk Planet editor Schalit, a political scientist based in San Francisco, offers his thoughts on capitalism, fundamentalism, Israel, religion, and music.

This “cosmopolitan Jew from nowhere” has always had an interest in religion, he tells us, and his first section begins promisingly with a solid discussion of Christian fundamentalism's methods of information dissemination. From there, however, Schalit moves on to the agenda of George W. Bush, the Heaven’s Gate cult, and the fact that for him, “religion is all about death.” Without an organizing principle, and with side jaunts to discuss the mistakes of a never-defined “left” and the failings of America’s economy, it’s not easy to discern just what point the author is trying to make. Ultimately, Joel Schalit’s essays function best as a guide to the meandering preoccupations of Joel Schalit, and this holds true whether he’s discussing communism, music, or Israel. The author may have much to say about the economy of independent record labels and anticapitalism, but the most vivid (and silliest) moment in his earnest rock ’n’ roll piece is an account of how he and a friend protested the commodification of punk music by telephoning radio stations and impersonating Kurt Cobain. Meanwhile, Schalit’s moral philosophizing dominates throughout: although he was horrified, for example, by the genocidal acts against Muslims in the Balkans, the idea that America's intervention might have had geo-economic motivations rendered the involvement “not pure enough” for his taste. The author is on more solid ground when he talks about his family's history in Israel, but this too devolves into a discussion of how he forced himself to forget Hebrew “out of disgust with the moral inconsistencies of Israel.”

Full of energy and a generalized need to protest injustice, but without a cogent argument that would compel the reader to care.