Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2010) Paperback £9.99 stg.
Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People, an academically minded historical work that nonetheless spent nineteen weeks on the bestseller list in Israel, is a book that is much more incendiary than it ought to be. Sand’s basic thesis – that [...]

Book Review: Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek (Verso, 2010)
Reading Žižek has always been as challenging as it is enjoyable, an experience of pleasure and pain that seems at times an intellectual correlate to the operation of objet petit a (little object a). The concept of objet petit a has been a constant in [...]

Gaza via London
Oh child of chance,
Oh blasted child,
Fair as ever anything,
Universe of wasted grace.
Kneeling now and always now
In your ruined house
Hearing troops of a general doom
Whistling with purpose
While priming their mortars for you.

When The Internationalists were first set up in Trinity College Dublin in November 1965, it was not as a fully-formed Marxist-Leninist party, but ‘as an exercise in better staff-student relations.’(1) Prominent among the initial group was Hardial Bains, a lecturer in bacteriology who was originally from India, but who had left for Canada in 1959 [...]

Ouija Boards are brilliant. Some people think that they are not brilliant, but they are wrong. What a Ouija Board is, is a special type of wooden board with writing on it that students use to roll spliffs on. However, they have many other uses beyond the obvious: They can also be used by teenagers [...]

[From Paula Geraghty of TradeUnionTVIreland.]

Thousands took to the streets to protest at the bailout of the banks and at the jobs crisis in Ireland. Watch some of the speeches, listen to the views of some of the protesters.
John Bisset a veteran campaigner for social justice was particularly scathing of the role of the media in [...]

The Invention of Paris, A History in Footsteps: Eric Hazan | Verso (2010) pp400 (£20)
There are few cities in the world as indelibly branded, in both a commercial and a figurative sense, in the minds of people as Paris. This is all thanks to a handful of iconic monuments made famous from millions upon millions [...]

Radical Irish Lives: Peadar O’Donnell by Donal Ó’Drisceoil - Cork University Press
The recent reportage of the teachers’ unions conferences would have delighted Peadar O’Donnell, who began his career as an activist in the INTO. The general tenor of the media response was ‘how dare these people object to having their pay slashed and conditions of [...]

The recent tragic killing of Toyosi Shittabey behooves us all to critically reflect upon, and engage in national dialogue about, the true scale and nature of racism in Irish society today. The pervasiveness of racism in Irish society is a reality that a number of young people in the Tyrellstown area—where Toyosi was killed—have eloquently [...]