Description: Jeffrey Israel offers an innovative argument for the power of playfulness in popular culture to make our capacity for coexistence imaginable. He explores how people from different backgrounds can pursue justice together, even as they play with their divisive grudges, prejudices, and desires in their cultural lives.
Review Quotes: How can a more perfect American union be attained given our legacy of historical group injustices and corresponding enduring group antagonisms? In this brilliantly original synthesis of insights from political philosophy, moral psychology, and Jewish American humor, Jeffrey Israel argues that through 'play'--not a facile (and unachievable) national Kumbaya reconciliation, but a reenacting of grudges in a bracketed psychological space backgrounding the political--we can at least come to live with each other in a way that recognizes our common vulnerable humanity.--Charles W. Mills, author of Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism