London Review of Books (LRB) – June 14 , 2024: The latest issue features Good Riddance to the Torries; Adam Shatz on ‘Israel’s Descent’; Patricia Lockwood – My Dame Antonia; William Davies – Generation Anxiety…

Anticipatory Anxiety by William Davies

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness 
by Jonathan Haidt.
Allen Lane, 385 pp., £25, March, 978 0 241 64766 0

In the​ 1980s the term ‘anxiety’ was almost eliminated from the lexicon of American psychiatry. The infamous DSM-III (the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) took an axe to various legacies of psychoanalysis that had dominated psychiatric thinking in the postwar decades. Among them was a preoccupation with anxiety. Anything and everything could, it seemed, be attributed to anxiety: whether it presented as a specific phobia or a panic attack, a somatic symptom or just a lurking sense of dread, anxiety was at the root. It was this sort of all-purpose explanation, with no apparent scientific rigour or falsifiability, that the authors of DSM-III were trying to root out.

Israel’s Descent by Adam Shatz

When Ariel Sharon​ withdrew more than eight thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, his principal aim was to consolidate Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank, where the settler population immediately began to increase. But ‘disengagement’ had another purpose: to enable Israel’s air force to bomb Gaza at will, something they could not do when Israeli settlers lived there.

The State of Israel v. the Jews 
by Sylvain Cypel, translated by William Rodarmor.
Other Press, 352 pp., £24, October 2022, 978 1 63542 097 5

The Palestinians of the West Bank have been, it seems, gruesomely lucky. They are encircled by settlers determined to steal their lands – and not at all hesitant about inflicting violence in the process – but the Jewish presence in their territory has spared them the mass bombardment and devastation to which Israel subjects the people of Gaza every few years.

Deux peuples pour un état?: Relire l’histoire du sionisme 
by Shlomo Sand.
Seuil, 256 pp., £20, January, 978 2 02 154166 3

Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-78 
by Geoffrey Levin.
Yale, 304 pp., £25, February, 978 0 300 26785 3

Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life 
by Joshua Leifer.
Dutton, 398 pp., £28.99, August, 978 0 593 18718 0

The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance 
by Shaul Magid.
Ayin, 309 pp., £16.99, December 2023, 979 8 9867803 1 3

Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm 
edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner.
OR Books, 336 pp., £17.99, Ap