The World After Gaza: A History
by Pankaj Mishra
Penguin Press, 2025
[Publication date: February 11, 2025]
by Pankaj Mishra
Penguin Press, 2025
[Publication date: February 11, 2025]
"Courageous and bracing, learned and ethical, rigorous and mind-expanding.” —Naomi Klein
“This profoundly important and urgent book finds Mishra, one of our most intellectually astute and courageous writers, at the peak of his powers.” —Hisham Matar
“A triumphant work of empathy in a polarizing conflict.” —Anand Giridharadas
Named a Best Book of the Month by TIME • Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by The Guardian, Bustle, Foreign Policy, and Literary Hub
From one of our foremost public intellectuals, an essential reckoning with the war in Gaza that reframes our understanding of the ongoing conflict, its historical roots, and the fractured global response
The postwar global order was in many ways shaped in response to the Holocaust. That event became the benchmark for atrocity, and, in the Western imagination, the paradigmatic genocide. Its memory orients so much of our thinking, and crucially, forms the basic justification for Israel’s right first to establish itself and then to defend itself. But in many parts of the world, ravaged by other conflicts and experiences of mass slaughter, the Holocaust’s singularity is not always taken for granted, even when its hideous atrocity is. Outside of the West, Pankaj Mishra argues, the dominant story of the twentieth century is that of decolonization.
The World After Gaza takes the current war, and the polarized reaction to it, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: the Global North’s triumphant account of victory over totalitarianism and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the Global South’s hopeful vision of racial equality and freedom from colonial rule. At a moment when the world’s balance of power is shifting, and the Global North no longer commands ultimate authority, it is critically important that we understand how and why the two halves of the world are failing to talk to each other.
As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful, and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis — about whether some lives matter more than others, how identity is constructed, and what the role of the nation-state ought to be. The World After Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present, and future.
“This profoundly important and urgent book finds Mishra, one of our most intellectually astute and courageous writers, at the peak of his powers.” —Hisham Matar
“A triumphant work of empathy in a polarizing conflict.” —Anand Giridharadas
Named a Best Book of the Month by TIME • Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by The Guardian, Bustle, Foreign Policy, and Literary Hub
From one of our foremost public intellectuals, an essential reckoning with the war in Gaza that reframes our understanding of the ongoing conflict, its historical roots, and the fractured global response
The postwar global order was in many ways shaped in response to the Holocaust. That event became the benchmark for atrocity, and, in the Western imagination, the paradigmatic genocide. Its memory orients so much of our thinking, and crucially, forms the basic justification for Israel’s right first to establish itself and then to defend itself. But in many parts of the world, ravaged by other conflicts and experiences of mass slaughter, the Holocaust’s singularity is not always taken for granted, even when its hideous atrocity is. Outside of the West, Pankaj Mishra argues, the dominant story of the twentieth century is that of decolonization.
The World After Gaza takes the current war, and the polarized reaction to it, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: the Global North’s triumphant account of victory over totalitarianism and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the Global South’s hopeful vision of racial equality and freedom from colonial rule. At a moment when the world’s balance of power is shifting, and the Global North no longer commands ultimate authority, it is critically important that we understand how and why the two halves of the world are failing to talk to each other.
As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful, and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis — about whether some lives matter more than others, how identity is constructed, and what the role of the nation-state ought to be. The World After Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present, and future.
REVIEWS:
“Stimulating and brilliantly researched . . . no incendiary polemic, but rather a sober and extensively documented treatise on the discursive history that has given rise to the current situation.” —The Irish Times
“Mishra’s book is a triumphant work of empathy in a polarizing conflict. It gives voice and extends sympathy and probes the innermost fears and aspirations of both parties in the conflict — and shows how fine the line is between humanity and its opposite.” —Anand Giridharadas, The.Ink
“The World After Gaza is a book of magnitude and grace. Mishra’s skills as a novelist enable him to provide vivid portraits of men and women struggling (and sometimes failing) to rail against the injustices of their eras. In doing so, we find not only a lament for what has gone wrong, a warning against the complicity that convenience can give rise to and an elegy for the world order that we are at risk of losing, but also a guide as to what we can be, each of us, individually.” —Markaz Review
“Mishra, who has employed his crystalline prose in novels and nonfiction alike, methodically unpacks the 'extensive moral breakdown' that preceded what he describes as 'the blithe slaughter of innocents in Gaza.' . . . At heart, this is an exhaustively sourced plea for historical literacy that opens up what Mishra calls 'a broader vista of human fraternity and solidarity' and recognizes that across the globe, people victimized by 'historical mass crimes of genocide, slavery and racist imperialism' wonder why 'their own holocausts . . . have not been much regarded in history.' . . . A clear-eyed look at the Holocaust as justification for Israel’s wars.” —Kirkus
“In this urgent book, Mishra grapples with the inexplicable spectacle of stone-faced Western elites ignoring, and indeed justifying, the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. Mishra reflects on the supposedly universal consensus that emerged from the Holocaust, as well as his own early sympathies for Israel, as he expounds on the terrible toll of this passivity in the face of atrocity.” —Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
“Guided by a determination to find an exit from the loop of endlessly repeating atrocities, Mishra leads readers on a search for meaning in modern history’s most depraved episodes. This is a rare text: courageous and bracing, learned and ethical, rigorous and mind-expanding.” —Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger
“This profoundly important and urgent book finds Mishra, one of our most intellectually astute and courageous writers, at the peak of his powers. His outrage is hard to ignore. But at the center of this urgent book is a humane inquiry into what suffering can make us do, and he leaves us with the troubling question of what world will we find after Gaza.” —Hisham Matar, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Return and My Friends
“Mishra’s latest undertakes the difficult but important task of reconciling the contradictory stories of the Global North and the Global South. While the former has squandered the last of its alleged moral authority in support of neoliberal empire the latter urgently seeks liberation from the deadly and ongoing aftershocks of colonialism. Essential reading." —Literary Hub
“Pankaj Mishra is our globally leading public intellectual, and his coruscating and scintillating meditation on the ethical purchase of Holocaust memory as the Gaza war goes on is one of the indispensable documents of civilization in a barbaric time. With his alert conscience, impeccable learning, and meditative writing, Mishra chronicles how the very attempt to register the crimes of the past in a world of continuing hierarchy can transform into an alibi for the disasters of the present.” —Samuel Moyn, author of Liberalism Against Itself and Humane
“A brilliant book, as thoughtful, scholarly and subtle as it is brave and original, The World After Gaza does what great writing is meant to do: to remind us of what it is to be human, to help us feel another's pain, to reach out and make connections across the trenches of race, color, and religion.”—William Dalrymple, author of The Golden Road
“Both a timeless and timely book, reading The World After Gaza feels like engaging in an ongoing conversation about the meaning of the Holocaust and colonialism with a good attentive friend.” —Eyal Weizman, author of Forensic Architecture
“An astute, humane, and necessary intervention, opening a path to the altered consciousness which has to be a consequence of Israel’s war on Gaza.” —Ahdaf Soueif, author of Cairo and The Map of Love
“With this utterly essential book, Pankaj Mishra has made a powerful contribution to the moral history of the world, bringing proportion and insight to a subject that is routinely lacking in both . . . The devastation of Gaza cannot be understood as a retaliatory act, but as a brutal extension of Israel’s renewed commitment to clearing lands that are not their own. Mishra’s book shows great understanding of the historical prejudice and violence that Jews themselves have suffered, and offers new clarity about how that trauma might have formed the current Israeli rhetoric . . . I can only say that fair-minded people and readers everywhere have a friend in this book, which sees without blinkers and speaks without fear. If books have a role today in the elucidation of justice, then I believe The World After Gaza will prove to be as crucial to our own times as James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time was to his.” —Andrew O'Hagan, author of Caledonian Road
“Pankaj Mishra remembers the future. The World After Gaza, with its elegant outrage and eloquent ache, will be the reference for those who judge our times tomorrow. Thanks to Mishra's all-too-human work, the next generation will know we were not all in vain.” —Ece Temelkuran
“Mishra brings his humanism, moral clarity and deep, cosmopolitan erudition to the question of how survivors of a genocide built a society that is committing a genocide broadcast live on our smartphones. A towering intellectual achievement.” —Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun (with Marwan Hisham)
"A book of passion, fury, and clarity. Mishra is one of the most important voices of our generation." —Peter Frankopan
"We all owe Pankaj Mishra a debt for crafting eloquent, urgent, and undeniable words from the horrors we are struggling to witness." —Afua Hirsch
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Pankaj Mishra is the author of Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, and several other books of nonfiction and fiction. Mishra won the 2024 Weston International Award, as well as the 2014 Windham–Campbell Prize for nonfiction. He writes regularly for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The London Review of Books, among others.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission.
All rights reserved.
Prologue
"Think of the vast amount of brutality, cruelty and
lies which are able to spread over the civilized world.
Do you really believe that a handful of ambitious
and deluding men without conscience could have
succeeded in unleashing all these evil spirits if their
millions of followers did not share their guilt?"
lies which are able to spread over the civilized world.
Do you really believe that a handful of ambitious
and deluding men without conscience could have
succeeded in unleashing all these evil spirits if their
millions of followers did not share their guilt?"
--Sigmund Freud
On 19 April 1943, a few hundred young Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto took up whatever arms they could find and struck back at their Nazi persecutors. Most Jews in the ghetto had already been deported to extermination camps. The fighters were, as one of their leaders Marek Edelman recalled, seeking to salvage some dignity: ‘All it was about, finally, was our not letting them slaughter us when our turn came. It was only a choice as to the manner of dying.’
After a few desperate weeks, the resisters were overwhelmed. Most of them were killed. Some of those still alive on the last day of the uprising committed suicide in the command bunker as the Nazis pumped gas into it; only a few managed to escape through sewer pipes. German soldiers then burned the ghetto, block by block, using flamethrowers to smoke out the survivors. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz later recalled hearing screams from the ghetto ‘on a beautiful quiet night, a country night in the outskirts of Warsaw’:
This screaming gave us goose pimples. They were the screams of thousands of people being murdered. It travelled through the silent spaces of the city from among a red glow of fires, under indifferent stars, into the benevolent silence of gardens in which plants laboriously emitted oxygen, the air was fragrant, and a man felt that it was good to be alive. There was something particularly cruel in this peace of the night, whose beauty and human crime struck the heart simultaneously. We did not look each other in the eye.
In a poem Milosz wrote in occupied Warsaw, ‘Campo dei Fiori’, he evokes the merry-go-round next to the ghetto’s wall, on which riders move skyward through the smoke of corpses, and whose jaunty tune drowns out the cries of agony and despair. Living in Berkeley, California, while the US military bombed and killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, an atrocity he compared to the crimes of Hitler and Stalin, Milosz again knew shameful complicity in extreme barbarity. ‘If we are capable of compassion and at the same time are powerless,’ he wrote, ‘then we live in a state of desperate exasperation.’
Israel’s annihilation of Gaza, provisioned by Western democracies, inflicted this psychic ordeal for months on millions of people–involuntary witnesses to an act of political evil, who allowed themselves to occasionally think that it was good to be alive, and then heard the screams of a mother watching her daughter burn to death in yet another school bombed by Israel.
The Shoah scarred several Jewish generations; Jewish Israelis in 1948 experienced the birth of their nation state as a matter of life and death, and then again in 1967 and 1973 amid annihilationist rhetoric from their Arab enemies. For many Jews who have grown up with the knowledge that the Jewish population of Europe was almost entirely wiped out, for no reason other than it was Jewish, the world cannot but appear fragile. Among them, the massacres and hostage-taking in Israel on 7 October 2023 by Hamas and other Palestinian groups rekindled a fear of another Holocaust.
But it was clear from the start that the most fanatical Israeli leadership in history would not shrink from exploiting an omnipresent sense of violation, bereavement and horror. Israel’s leaders claimed the right to self-defence against Hamas, but as Omer Bartov, a major historian of the Holocaust, recognised in August 2024, they sought from the very beginning ‘to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory’. Thus, for months after 7 October, billions of people beheld an extraordinary onslaught on Gaza whose victims, as Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, an Irish lawyer and South Africa’s representative at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, put it, were ‘broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain, hope that the world might do something’.
The world, or more specifically the West, didn’t do anything. Behind the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, Marek Edelman was ‘terribly afraid’ that ‘nobody in the world would notice a thing’, and ‘nothing, no message about us, would ever make it out’. This wasn’t the case in Gaza, where victims foretold their death on digital media hours before they were executed, and their murderers breezily broadcast their deeds on TikTok. Yet the livestreamed liquidation of Gaza was daily obfuscated, if not denied, by the instruments of the West’s military and cultural hegemony: from the leaders of the United States and United Kingdom attacking the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice to the New York Times editors instructing their staff, in an internal memo, to avoid the terms ‘refugee camps’, ‘occupied territory’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’.
Every day came to be poisoned by the awareness that while we went about our lives hundreds of ordinary people were being murdered, or being forced to witness the murder of their children. Pleas from people in Gaza, often well-known writers and journalists, warning that they and their loved ones were about to be killed, followed by news of their killing, compounded the humiliation of physical and political incapacity. Those driven by the guilt of helpless implication to scan Joe Biden’s face for some sign of mercy, some sign of an end to bloodletting, found an eerily smooth hardness, broken only by a nervous smirk when he blurted out Israeli lies that Palestinians had beheaded Jewish babies. Righteous hopes aroused by this or that United Nations resolution, frantic appeals from humanitarian NGOs, strictures from jurors at The Hague, and the last-minute replacement of Biden as presidential candidate, were brutally dashed. By late 2024, many people living very far from Gaza’s killing fields were feeling – at a remove, but feeling – that they had been dragged through an epic landscape of misery and failure, anguish and exhaustion. This might seem an exaggerated emotional toll among mere onlookers. But then the shock and outrage provoked when Picasso unveiled Guernica, with its horses and humans screaming while being murdered from the sky, was the effect of a single image from Gaza of a father holding the headless corpse of his child.
The war will eventually recede into the past, and time may flatten its towering pile of horrors. But signs of the calamity will remain in Gaza for decades: in the injured bodies, the orphaned children, the rubble of its cities, the homeless peoples, and in the pervasive presence and consciousness of mass bereavement. And those who watched helplessly from afar the killing and maiming of tens of thousands on a narrow coastal strip, and witnessed, too, the applause or indifference of the powerful, will live with an inner wound, and a trauma that will not pass away for years.
Blood in the Face: White Nationalism from the Birth of a Nation to the Age of Trump (revised new edition)
by James Ridgeway
Haymarket Books, 2025
[Publication date: January 14, 2025]
When the book 's prescience about the dangers of the racist far-right became manifest in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, a second edition of BLOOD IN THE FACE was released with a new introduction charting the rise of the Militia Movement to which Timothy McVeigh and his co-conspirators were connected. Since then, both the book and the documentary film that accompanied its release (also titled BLOOD IN THE FACE), have earned cult followings.
In the past 25 years, Ridgeway 's final warning--that the "fringe was becoming part of the fabric" of American politics and culture, have come to chilling fruition in the rise of the Tea Party, the racist backlash against the presidency of Barack Obama, the resurgence of anti-immigrant Nativism, the growth of racist far-right media, and the election of Donald Trump with the thunderous support of white nationalists.
REVIEWS:
"This revised new (and with the death of James Ridgeway) final edition of "Blood in the Face: White Nationalism from the Birth of a Nation to the Age of Trump" from Haymarket Books must be considered an essential addition to community and college/university library Contemporary American Political Science/Social Justice collections -- and the personal reading lists of students, academia, governmental policy makers, political activists, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in understanding and resisting the current trends towards American Nationalism/Fascism." ―Midwest Book Review
"Few listened when James Ridgeway sounded the alarm about the resurgent far-right. He dissected the racist resurgence of the 1980s, which is all too relevant given today's nightmares." ―James R. Tracy, editor A Southern Panther, Conversations With Malik Rahim
"[A] guidebook through the nether regions of the racist universe." ―New York Times
"Ridgeway is a skilled guide through the bewildering and amorphous network of racists, radical tax resisters, skinheads, Nazis and Klansmen that composes what he terms 'an organized and, at times, violent, new far-right movement." ―Los Angeles Times
"[A] comprehensive view of racist politics in the United States (with some reference to Western European politics)." ―Library Journal
"With startling detail, this volume sets forth the violent histories of such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1866 by six former Confederate soldiers; the John Birch Society, an anti civil rights group masquerading as an anti Communist force; and the Po sse Comitatus, whose members gather in posses to "protect" the white race from the scourge of Jews, blacks and other minorities. Examining their influence on the political climate of the U.S., Ridgeway profiles such leaders as David Dukes, the former head of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana who ran for the Senate in 1990. Readers may feel overwhelmed by the amount of information this fascinating book imparts...." ―Publishers Weekly
"Clear and comprehensive." ―Kirkus
"[P]aint[s] a worrying picture of groups and ideologies that inspire Dylann Roof." ―Guardian
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
James Ridgeway (1936-2021) was senior Washington correspondent for Mother Jones, and co-editor of Solitary Watch. A veteran investigative reporter and the author of 16 books, he also wrote for the Village Voice, the Nation, the New Republic, Ramparts and the Wall Street Journal, among others. He was also a Soros Justice Media Fellow.
Live Theory: The Aronowitz Reader
by Stanley Aronowitz
Eris, 2025
Edited by:
Peter Bratsis
Bruno Gulli
Kristin Lawler
Stanley Aronowitz was a towering figure on the American Left for over sixty years. Both a tireless organizer and a militant social and political theorist, Aronowitz was a highly perceptive analyst of class power. He was dedicated throughout his career to the development and circulation of conceptual weapons for the working class and for all those who faced oppression within American society.
Live Theory: The Stanley Aronowitz Reader brings together in thirteen seminal essays Aronowitz’s theoretical contributions to fundamental questions regarding science, class, culture, and education, alongside his pioneering interventions on labor, contract unionism, and the ongoing struggle for radical democracy. It is a crucial introduction to an indispensable thinker.
REVIEWS:
One of America’s most prominent social theorists. -- The Brooklyn Rail
Stanley Aronowitz is a national treasure. -- Peter McLaren, UCLA
Stanley Aronowitz is the most important scholar on the past and present US working class. -- Cornel West
Stanley was a distinguished scholar of labor, work, unions, class, education, American politics, and Marxism. [False Promises] is the most wide-ranging exploration of working-class consciousness I’ve ever read. . . A fighting left needs more people like him. -- Jamie McCallum, Jacobin
Through his radical and relentless pursuit of knowledge and justice, Aronowitz provided a blueprint for living an intellectual life that matters to those of us who refuse to accept the status quo. -- Eric Weiner, Montclair State University
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Stanley Aronowitz (1933-2021) was a sociologist, labor organizer, and political activist. He taught at a number of higher education institutions―including the CUNY Graduate Center―and was a founder of multiple alternative educational projects, as well as the journals Social Text and Situations. His major works include The Crisis in Historical Materialism: Class, Politics, and Culture in Marxist Theory, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness, and Against Schooling: For an Education That Matters.
Live Theory: The Stanley Aronowitz Reader brings together in thirteen seminal essays Aronowitz’s theoretical contributions to fundamental questions regarding science, class, culture, and education, alongside his pioneering interventions on labor, contract unionism, and the ongoing struggle for radical democracy. It is a crucial introduction to an indispensable thinker.
REVIEWS:
One of America’s most prominent social theorists. -- The Brooklyn Rail
Stanley Aronowitz is a national treasure. -- Peter McLaren, UCLA
Stanley Aronowitz is the most important scholar on the past and present US working class. -- Cornel West
Stanley was a distinguished scholar of labor, work, unions, class, education, American politics, and Marxism. [False Promises] is the most wide-ranging exploration of working-class consciousness I’ve ever read. . . A fighting left needs more people like him. -- Jamie McCallum, Jacobin
Through his radical and relentless pursuit of knowledge and justice, Aronowitz provided a blueprint for living an intellectual life that matters to those of us who refuse to accept the status quo. -- Eric Weiner, Montclair State University
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Stanley Aronowitz (1933-2021) was a sociologist, labor organizer, and political activist. He taught at a number of higher education institutions―including the CUNY Graduate Center―and was a founder of multiple alternative educational projects, as well as the journals Social Text and Situations. His major works include The Crisis in Historical Materialism: Class, Politics, and Culture in Marxist Theory, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness, and Against Schooling: For an Education That Matters.
