Taking in everything from the biblical Kingdom of David to the recent rise in global anti-Semitism, Ruth Wisse offers a radical new way of thinking about the Jewish relationship to power. Traditional Jews long believed that upholding the covenant with God at Sinai constituted a treaty with the most powerful force in the universe; this allowed them to pursue their way of life in exile knowing that they would eventually be returned to the Land of Israel if they fulfilled their religious obligations. Wisse demonstrates how the Jewish political experiment generated a great capacity for adaptation, but also increased Jewish vulnerability and unwittingly goaded power-seeking nations to cast Jews as perpetual targets.
Although she sees hope in the creation and flourishing of the State of Israel, Wisse questions the way the strategies of the Diaspora continue to drive the Jewish state. She also draws a persuasive parallel to the United States today, as it struggles to figure out how a liberal democracy can face off against enemies who view universal ideas of morality as weakness. With Jews and Power, Wisse gives us a provocative book that offers a compelling argument rich with history and bristling with a contemporary urgency.
Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism, by Moses Hess
From the book jacket…
This is the book that ultimately led to the creation of Israel. European Jews had been vilified and persecuted for centuries, and Moses Hess discussed it long before the rise of Hitler and Nazism. He believed that the Jews would always be homeless, unwelcome people unless they had their own country, and was the first to introduce the concepts of Zionism, and the first to call for the foundation of a Jewish socialist commonwealth. Hess blends secular and religious philosophies, Hegelian dialectics, Spinoza’s pantheism, and Marxism into philosophical grounds for Jewish nationalism. He explains why the Jewish race is indestructible, and that the only solution of the Jewish question lies in returning to Palestine. Hess is prophetic in his writing.
Rome and Jerusalem belongs to the very few books which are written in advance of their time.
1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War, by Benny Morris
From the book jacket…
This history of the foundational war in the Arab-Israeli conflict is groundbreaking, objective, and deeply revisionist. A riveting account of the military engagements, it also focuses on the war’s political dimensions. Benny Morris probes the motives and aims of the protagonists on the basis of newly opened Israeli and Western documentation. The Arab side — where the archives are still closed — is illuminated with the help of intelligence and diplomatic materials.
Morris stresses the jihadi character of the two-stage Arab assault on the Jewish community in Palestine. Throughout, he examines the dialectic between the war’s military and political developments and highlights the military impetus in the creation of the refugee problem, which was a by-product of the disintegration of Palestinian Arab society. The book thoroughly investigates the role of the Great Powers — Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union — in shaping the conflict and its tentative termination in 1949. Morris looks both at high politics and general staff decision-making processes and at the nitty-gritty of combat in the successive battles that resulted in the emergence of the State of Israel and the humiliation of the Arab world, a humiliation that underlies the continued Arab antagonism toward Israel.
Sephardi Voices: The Untold Expulsion of Jews from Arab Lands, by Henry Green and Richard Stursberg.
From the publisher…
In the years following the founding of the State of Israel, close to a million Jews became refugees fleeing their ancestral homelands in the Middle East, North Africa, and Iran. State-sanctioned discrimination, violence, and political unrest brought an abrupt end to these once vibrant communities, scattering their members to the four corners of the earth. Their stories are mostly untold.
Sephardi Voices is a window into the experiences of these communities and their stories of survival. Through gripping first-hand accounts and stunning portrait and documentary photography, we hear on-the-ground stories of pogroms in Libya and Egypt, the burning of synagogues in Syria, the terrible Farhud in Iraq, families escaping via the great airlifts of the Magic Carpet and Operations Ezra and Nehemiah, husbands smuggled in carpets into Iran in search of wives. The authors also provide crucial historical background for these events, as well as updates on the lives of some of these Sephardi Jews who have gone on to rebuild fortunes in London and New York, write novels, and win Nobel Prizes. Sephardi Voices is at once a wide-ranging and intimate story of a large-scale catastrophe and a portrait of the vulnerability of the passage of time.
Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, by Michael Oren.
From the publisher…
In 1967 the future of the state of Israel was far from certain. But with its swift and stunning military victory against an Arab coalition led by Egypt in the Six Day War, Israel not only preserved its existence but redrew the map of the region, with fateful consequences. The Camp David Accords, the assassinations of Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin, the intifada, and the current troubled peace negotiations — all of these trace their origins to the Six Day War.
Michael Oren’s Six Days of War is a gripping account of one of the most dramatic and important episodes in the history of the Middle East. With exhaustive research in primary sources — including Soviet, Jordanian, and Syrian files not previously available — he has reconstructed the tension-filled background and the dramatic military events of the conflict, drawing the threads together in a riveting narrative, enlivened by crisp characters sketches of major characters (many of whom, from Ariel Sharon to Yasser Arafat, are still leading figures today). Most important, Oren has unearthed some dramatic new findings. He has discovered that a top-secret Egyptian plan to invade Israel and wipe out its army and nuclear reactor came within hours of implementation. He also reveals how the superpowers narrowly avoided a nuclear showdown over the Eastern Mediterranean and how a military coup in Israel almost occurred on the eve of the war.
