"A bestselling historian uncovers the surprising roots of America's long alliance with Israel and its troubling consequences
Fights about the fate of the state of Israel, and the Zionist movement that gave birth to it, have long been a staple of both Jewish and American political culture. But despite these arguments' significance to American politics, American Jewish life, and to Israel itself, no one has ever systematically examined their history and explained why they matter.
In We Are Not One, historian Eric Alterman traces this debate from its nineteenth-century origins. Following Israel's 1948–1949 War of Independence (called the 'nakba' or 'catastrophe' by Palestinians), few Americans, including few Jews, paid much attention to Israel or the challenges it faced. Following the 1967 Six-Day War, however, almost overnight support for Israel became the primary component of American Jews' collective identity. Over time, Jewish organizations joined forces with conservative Christians and neoconservative pundits and politicos to wage a tenacious fight to define Israel's image in the United States media, popular culture, Congress, and college campuses. Deeply researched, We Are Not One reveals how our consensus on Israel and Palestine emerged and why, today, it is fracturing."
"This definitive history of presidential lying reveals how our standards for truthfulness have eroded -- and why Trump's lies are especially dangerous.
If there's one thing we know about Donald Trump, it's that he lies. But he's by no means the first president to do so. In Lying in State, Eric Alterman asks how we ended up with such a pathologically dishonest commander in chief, showing that, from early on, the United States has persistently expanded its power and hegemony on the basis of presidential lies. He also reveals the cumulative effect of this deception-each lie a president tells makes it more acceptable for subsequent presidents to lie-and the media's complicity in spreading misinformation. Donald Trump, then, represents not an aberration but the culmination of an age-old trend.
Full of vivid historical examples and trenchant analysis, Lying in State is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how we arrived in this age of alternative facts."
"Thanks to the machinations of the right, there is no dirtier word in American politics today than "liberal." Yet public opinion polls consistently show that the majority of Americans hold liberal views on everything from health care to foreign policy.
In this feisty, accessible primer, Eric Alterman sets out to restore liberalism to its rightful honored place as the politics of America's everyday citizens. In a crisply argued and extensively documented counterattack on right-wing spin and misinformation, Alterman briskly disposes of such canards as "Liberals Hate God" and "Liberals Are Soft on Terrorism," reclaiming liberalism from the false definitions foisted upon it.
Why We're Liberals is the perfect book for all of those ready to fight back against the conservative mud-slinging machine and claim their voice in the political debate."
"Is media bias keeping us from getting the whole story? If so, who is at fault? Is it the Liberals who are purported to be running the newsrooms, television and radio stations of this country, duping an unsuspecting public into mistaking their party line for news? Or is it the conservatives who have identified media bias as a rallying cry around which to consolidate their political base? The media has become so large and pervasive in our lives that regardless of exactly where on the ideological fence you sit, the question of media bias has become all-but unavoidable.
What Liberal Media? confronts the question of liberal bias and provides a sharp and utterly convincing assessment of the realities of political bias in the news. In distinct contrast to the conclusions reached by Ann Coulter, Bernard Goldberg, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'reilly, Alterman finds the media to be far more conservative than liberal. The fact that conservatives howl so much louder and more effectively than liberals is one big reason that big media is always on its guard for 'liberal' bias but gives conservative bias a free press.
After listening to What Liberal Media? you will understand that the real news story of recent years is not whether this newspaper, or that news anchor, is biased but rather to what extent the entire news industry is organized to communicate conservative views and push our politics to the right -- regardless of how 'liberal' any given reporter may be in 'real life'."
