Adam Shatz

Adam Shatz is the LRB’s US editor. He is the author of Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination, which includes many pieces from the paper, and The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. He has written for the LRB on subjects including the war in Gaza, Fanon, France’s war in Algeria, mass incarceration in America and Deleuze and Guattari. His LRB podcast series, Human Conditions, considers revolutionary thought in the 20th century through conversations with Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards. Sign up here.

Letter

Bad Origins

9 June 2022

William Davies writes that Alexis de Tocqueville ‘paid little attention to the French colonisation of Algeria’. In fact, Tocqueville was regarded as the National Assembly’s leading expert on Algeria and made two visits to the country in 1841 and 1846, during the army’s counterinsurgency against a rebellion led by the Emir Abdel-Kader. He was also an impassioned advocate for Algeria’s ...
Letter
Adam Shatz writes: It is no secret among those who follow the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – as opposed to those who get their news from the Jerusalem Post and Aipac – that since the 2007 Mecca agreement with Fatah, Hamas has supported the creation of a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, on the basis of a long-term truce, or hudna, with Israel. As Khalid Mishal, the head of Hamas’s political...
Letter

Iraq’s Jews

6 November 2008

Adam Shatz writes: The evocation of Mesopotamia as a lost paradise can be found not only in Violette Shamash’s book but in countless memoirs by Iraqi Jews. Like all non-Muslim minorities, Jews experienced periods of difficulty and injustice, but if they had been persecuted to the degree Lyn Julius suggests, it’s not likely so many would have continued to describe themselves as ‘Ottomans’ long...
Letter

‘Obsession’

9 October 2008

Adam Shatz writes: If there is any confusion about Emet’s relationship to ‘Obsession’, it has been sown by Sarah Stern and her colleagues. I based my assertion that Emet had arranged the distribution of the film on an interview which Ari Morgenstern, then identified as a spokesman for Emet, gave to Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton of the Inter Press Service news agency on 24 September, in which he...
Letter
In his otherwise admirable essay on Camus and Sartre, Jonathan Rée writes that ‘following a series of battles in Algeria’, Camus ‘came to the conclusion that the French state must intervene to restore order and protect both the Arab population and the French settlers’ (LRB, 20 January). These battles, sparked in early May 1945 by the killing of scores of French settlers in pro-independence...

Fanon’s world has a logic. His pages are full of identities, contradictions, Aufhebungen – master and slave, being and nothingness. Any biography, however, has to decide in the end which of the various...

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