Zionism’s Redemptions


Book Description

Zionism combined dialogues with Jewish, Christian, and secular messianisms to create a politics based in redemptive visions of its own.




No masters but God


Book Description

The forgotten legacy of religious Jewish anarchism, and the adventures and ideas of its key figures, finally comes to light in this book. Set in the decades surrounding both world wars, No masters but God identifies a loosely connected group of rabbis and traditionalist thinkers who explicitly appealed to anarchist ideas in articulating the meaning of the Torah, traditional practice, Jewish life and the mission of modern Jewry. Full of archival discoveries and first translations from Yiddish and Hebrew, it explores anarcho-Judaism in its variety through the works of Yaakov Meir Zalkind, Yitshak Nahman Steinberg, Yehudah Leyb Don-Yahiya, Avraham Yehudah Heyn, Natan Hofshi, Shmuel Alexandrov, Yehudah Ashlag and Aaron Shmuel Tamaret. With this ground-breaking account, Hayyim Rothman traces a complicated story about the modern entanglement of religion and anarchism, pacifism and Zionism, prophetic anti-authoritarianism and mystical antinomianism.




The Founding Fathers of Zionism


Book Description

Before the state of Israel became a reality in 1948, a group of thinkers advanced the idea; five of these men would become icons of the Zionist movement, and today, renowned history professor Benzion Netanyahu (himself a significant figure) has profiled The Founding Fathers of Zionism.




Israel


Book Description

A history of Israel in the context of the modern Jewish experience and the history of the Middle East




Auto-emancipation


Book Description




Prophets Outcast


Book Description

Includes writings by Isaac Deutscher, Sigmund Freud, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Leon Trotsky, I. F. Stone, Uri Avnery, Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, and others.




Secularizing the Sacred


Book Description

As historical analyses of Diaspora Jewish visual culture blossom in quantity and sophistication, this book analyzes 19th-20th-century developments in Jewish Palestine and later the State of Israel. In the course of these approximately one hundred years, Zionist Israelis developed a visual corpus and artistic lexicon of Jewish-Israeli icons as an anchor for the emerging “civil religion.” Bridging internal tensions and even paradoxes, artists dynamically adopted, responded to, and adapted significant Diaspora influences for Jewish-Israeli purposes, as well as Jewish religious themes for secular goals, all in the name of creating a new state with its own paradoxes, simultaneously styled on the Enlightenment nation-state and Jewish peoplehood.




The Idea of Modern Jewish Culture


Book Description

The vast majority of intellectual, religious, and national developments in modern Judaism revolve around the central idea of "Jewish culture." This book is the first synoptic view of these developments that organizes and relates them from this vantage point. The first Jewish modernization movements perceived culture as the defining trait of the outside alien social environment to which Jewry had to adapt. To be "cultured" was to be modern-European, as opposed to medieval-ghetto-Jewish. In short order, however, the Jewish religious legacy was redefined retrospectively as a historical "culture," with fateful consequences for the conception of Judaism as a human and not only a divinely mandated regime. The conception of Judaism-as-culture took two main forms: an integrative, vernacular Jewish culture that developed in tandem with the integration of Jews into the various nations of western-central Europe and America, and a national Hebrew culture which, though open to the inputs of modern European society, sought to develop a revitalized Jewish national identity that ultimately found expression in the revival of the Jewish homeland and the State of Israel. This is a large, complex story in which the author describes the contributions of Mendelssohn, Wessely, Krochmal, Zunz, the mainstream Zionist thinkers (especially Ahad Ha-Am, Bialik, and A.D. Gordon), Kook, Kaplan, and Dubnow to the formulation of the various versions of the modern Jewish cultural ideal.




The Political Philosophy of Zionism


Book Description

Zionism emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in response to a rise in anti-Semitism in Europe and to the crisis of modern Jewish identity. This novel, national revolution aimed to unite a scattered community, defined mainly by shared texts and literary tradition, into a vibrant political entity destined for the Holy Land. However, Zionism was about much more than a national political ideology and practice. By tracing its origins in the context of a European history of ideas and by considering the writings of key Jewish and Hebrew writers and thinkers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book offers an entirely new philosophical perspective on Zionism as a unique movement based on intellectual boldness and belief in human action. In counter-distinction to the studies of history and ideology that dominate the field, this book also offers a new way of reflecting upon contemporary Israeli politics.