Restoring the Fortunes of Zion Neil Rogachevsky reviews “Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn” by Daniel Gordis.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/restoring-the-fortunes-of-zion-1477003407
In the old days, Israelis displayed a charming if not always prudent insouciance about what the rest of the world thought of their country. But anti-Israel opinion, always high, has spiked in recent years, including in the United States. And so Israel and its supporters have been forced to step up their efforts to defend the Jewish state in the so-called battle of ideas. Pro-Israel philanthropists have sponsored trips to Israel, boosted advocacy efforts on college campuses and founded a plethora of research institutes, social media feeds and journals aimed at making Israel’s case.
Despite the billions that have been spent on pro-Israel programs, there’s a lack of approachable, popular histories that avoid polemics and actually teach you something. This is what Daniel Gordis aims to supply with “Israel,” which narrates the story of Israel from the origins of the Zionist movement in the late 19th century until today. Though written as a chronological narrative, Mr. Gordis’s purpose is more poetic than historical. The author does not revise previous accounts of Israeli history; the book has very limited original scholarship. He rather wishes to tell the story of the Jewish return to political sovereignty after two millennia of exile, and, despite its flaws, the stunning success of the enterprise so far.
Mr. Gordis, a Jerusalem-based commentator and academic born in New York, deserves credit for ignoring at least one fashion of the history profession: the view that identifying with one’s subject is the mark of a fool or a shill. The author loves his adopted homeland without ignoring its blemishes. He treats the most contested episodes in Israeli history, such as the plight of both Arab and Jewish refugees during the 1948 War of Independence, honestly and fairly.
ENLARGE Israel
By Daniel Gordis
Ecco, 546 pages, $29.99
Yet the emotional writing has some pitfalls. Though he tries to move and inspire, Mr. Gordis’s prose is sometimes cloying. Yes, Bill Clinton did say “shalom chaver,” or “goodbye friend,” at the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. But to claim that these words have become “forever engraved on Israelis’ memory,” is the stuff of a National Jewish Democratic Council fundraising email. Discussing the return of the ancient Israelites from Egypt, Mr. Gordis turns Pharoah into a kitschy theorist of nationhood. Pharaoh, says Mr. Gordis, recognized “a magnetic attraction between a people and its land.” CONTINUE AT SITE
Comments are closed.
