BOOKS
To read about my translated books, buy some of them and find text extracts, click here. Additional information on all my books (including those not translated) is available in Swedish here. My most frequently translated book is:
Det förlorade landet: en personlig historia
Det förlorade landet is a personal essay, a history of ideas, an intellectual journey, a daring and provoking venture. It is a book about Israel, not only as the modern Jewish State, but as perhaps the most thorough and influential utopia of our civilization: The Promised Land. In Swedish, one single letter makes the difference between Promised and Lost. "Göran Rosenberg traces the roots of present day Israel way back in history, beyond Zionism and the Holocaust, to the Biblical promise of Messiah, the ingathering of the exile and the institution of God’s final order on earth. It is a fascinating and illuminating journey, providing new and eye-opening perspectives to one of the most central motifs in Western history. The title indicates where Rosenberg’s personal exploration finally takes him."
ARTICLES
Dagens Nyheter op-ed, Jan 8th 2009
Beyond All Reason
What reason now demands is that the new US president as soon as possible brings the counter-productive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to a conclusion and invests what is left of US power and prestige to push for the implementation of the only reasonable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Dagens Nyheter op-ed, Aug 12th 2008
How to stop Iran
How to have Iran willingly and in its own interest give up on nuclear weapons? is the question. Having the already existing nuclear powers start making good on their commitment to give up on them as well, is perhaps the answer.
Contribution to the Engelsberg Seminar 2007: The Future of the West
The Future of a European Gemeinschaft
The first thing to say about the future of a European Gemeinschaft is that there is no such thing as a European Gemeinschaft and there never has been.
The new epilogue to the third Swedish edition of The Lost Land 2007
Back in the Ghetto
A policy for locking the Palestinians out will increasingly also lock the Jews in.
Dagens Nyheter op-ed, Jan 26th 2007
What Are Jews Allowed to Say About Israel?
To be accused of “deep down” wishing the destruction of Israel in a major Jewish publication is no small thing.
Dagens Nyheter, July 25th 2006 (also in Information, Denmark and Morgenbladet, Norway)
The Futility of Military Superiority
You don’t have do be from Venus to argue that the warriors from Mars seriously have miscalculated what it takes to achieve peace and security on Earth.
Dagens Nyheter, Feb 11 2006 (also in Politiken, Denmark and Morgenbladet, Norway)
Freedom of Expression and Its Limits
The formal laws constituting freedom of expression in democratic societies are only the tip of the iceberg of unwritten agreements between citizens about what they can express publicly in one context or another. As pdf-document.
Dagens Nyheter, Jan 4, 7, 11, 2004 (also in Information, Bergens Tidende, and Stavanger Aftenblad)
The Empire of Fear, Faith and Hope
Three reports on the state of American society after 9/11. Provisional English translation.
Süddeutsche Zeitung, feuilleton, Jan 24 2004.
Israels Botschafter und das Kunstwerk
Der Auftrag, den der Botschafter zur großen Zufriedenheit seiner Auftraggeber ausgeführt hatte, bestand darin, ins Rampenlicht zu treten und die israelische Rechtsregierung zu verteidigen, eine Regierung, die immer weniger davor zurückschreckt, die Anschuldigung des Antisemitismus zu brauchen oder zu missbrauchen, um eine immer brutaler werdende Politik von Besatzung, Unterdrückung und Demütigung zu rechtfertigen.
New York Times, op-ed, Sep 23 2003.
The Spell of Sweden's Golden Past (pdf-file)
What Swedes have yet to wake up from is not innocence, but self-delusion.The death of foreign minister Anna Lindh should be
a wake-up call from our delusion about the nature of our society, and our delusion that we can be in Europe but not a part of it.
Contribution to the conference “From Sick Care to Healthcare in the Age of Learning”, Stockholm Sep 7-8, 2002.
Insatiable Demand and Infinite Supply.
The Moral Limits to Healthcare.
Any concept of health and cure needs a concept of suffering and defeat. Every vision of limitless health-care needs a vision of the limits of human life.
Eurozine
The War of Words (English)
The decision to define the events of September 11 as an act of war calling for a response in kind had far-reaching implications for the way in which the mass media portrayed the
developments that followed. Events and deeds that journalists should have reserved the right to articulate themselves were put into their mouths pre-articulated.
Eurozine
Der Krieg ums Wort
Über die Beschreibbarkeit des Denkbaren und des Möglichen
Der Entschluss, die Anschläge vom 11. September als Kriegshandlungen und die Antwort als Krieg zu definieren, war alles andere als selbstverständlich, hat aber weitreichende Konsequenzen für die Art und Weise, wie die Medien die weiteren Ereignisse beschreiben.
Eurozine
A Pluralist Democracy
The democracies of today can remain democracies only if they are able to negotiate pluralism and communality, conflict and justice, rationality and identity. What must we do to meet this challenge, asks Göran Rosenberg and presents a possible answer: federation.
Paper delivered at Communitarian Summit, Geneva July 12-14, 1996
Freedom and Necessity
Is there a way to strengthen those parts of modern existence where true meaning can occur, where the distinctively human freedom to create and act can be separated from the demands of necessity and exterior goals – without demolishing the foundations of material welfare (the realm of Necessity)?
Eurozine
Antisemitismus: Tatsächliche und fiktive Bedrohung
Göran Rosenberg argumentiert, dass antisemitische Phantasien nichts mit Juden selber zu tun haben. Jedoch scheint der oft angebrachte Vorwurf des Antisemitismus die Okkupationspolitik der israelischen Armee in einem beunruhigendem Maße zu legitimieren.
Eurozine
La démocratie au service du pluralisme
L'enjeu d'aujourd'hui n'est pas de choisir entre le pluralisme ou l'homogénéité mais entre le pluralisme auréolé de démocratie ou le pluralisme dépourvu de démocratie, entre le pluralisme doté d'institutions démocratiquement légitimes destinées à gérer les conflits ou le pluralisme dénué de telles institutions.
Eurozine
Amerika die Lösung, die Welt das Problem?
Behind the recent conflict between America and Europe lies a radical shift in policy. But this shift has not been made in Germany, in France or in any of the other countries in "old Europe", writes Göran Rosenberg. What has happened has happened in America.
New Perspectives Quarterly. Summer 2002
The Making of an Enemy
This is not a defense of Yassir Arafat. Political leaders must be able to defend themselves. This is only an attempt to understand how Yassir Arafat could change within 18 months from a "partner for peace" to an outlawed "terrorist" who Israel could shackle in front of a gun, brand as a fraud and finally, with recent US approval, render harmless as a political leader.
From Crisis and Culture, the Case of Germany and Sweden, ed Lars Trägårdh and Nina Witoszek, Berghahn Books 2002
The Crisis of Consensus in Post-War Sweden
The gist of this essay is that some societies might have an easier transition to a culture of pluralism and diversity than others, and that Sweden might have greater difficulties than most. The main reason for this is the still existing link between Sweden’s increasingly dysfunctional tradition of institutional consensus and Sweden’s seemingly irreplaceable national mythology.
Download as pdf-file.
Excerpts from talk at conference "Rethinking the Nation State", Florence October 1999
The Squaring of the Warm Circle – Bernadotte in Palestine
A dramatic and perhaps illustrative manifestation of the conflict between the notion of wider justice and the impact of ethnic or national phobias, is the short and tragic intervention by the UN-appointed mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, in the war of 1948
Lecture at Conference Galut 2000, Berlin 1998, published in Turning the Kaleidoscope, Perspectives on European Jewry (ed Sandra Lustig, Ian Leveson), Berghahn Books 2005
Zion and Diaspora – from Solution to Problem
The national institutions in Israel tacitly claim to speak for the Jews of the world and not only for the Jews of Israel, which is a position increasingly hard to maintain in face of the deep internal and external controversies surrounding the most crucial of these decisions and actions.
The Communitarian Summit, Geneva July 12-14, 1996
Community and the Limits of Necessity
Is there a way to strengthen those parts of modern existence where true meaning can occur, where the distinctively human freedom to create and act can be separated from the demands of necessity and exterior goals – without demolishing the foundations of material welfare (the realm of Necessity)?
