The Object of Zionism

Author: Zvi Efrat
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 960

Book Description
The Object of Zionism is a critical study of Zionist spatial planning and the architectural fabrication of the State of Israel from the early 20th century to the 1960s and '70s. Zvi Efrat scrutinizes Israel as a singular modernist project, unprecedented in its political and ethical circumstances and its hyper-production of spatial and structural experiments. Efrat explores the construction of the State of Israel in a book that promises to become a standard reference on Israeli architectural history.

Deconstructing Zionism

Author: Gianni Vattimo
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441115560
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
This volume in the Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy series provides a political and philosophical critique of Zionism. While other nationalisms seem to have adapted to twenty-first century realities and shifting notions of state and nation, Zionism has largely remained tethered to a nineteenth century mentality, including the glorification of the state as the only means of expressing the spirit of the people. These essays, contributed by eminent international thinkers including Slavoj Zizek, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Gianni Vattimo, Walter Mignolo, Marc Ellis, and others, deconstruct the political-metaphysical myths that are the framework for the existence of Israel.Collectively, they offer a multifaceted critique of the metaphysical, theological, and onto-political grounds of the Zionist project and the economic, geopolitical, and cultural outcomes of these foundations. A significant contribution to the debates surrounding the state of Israel today, this groundbreaking work will appeal to anyone interested in political theory, philosophy, Jewish thought, and the Middle East conflict.

A Threat from Within

Author:
Publisher: Zed Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
"There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." These words by the poet Leonard Cohen could aptly describe this book, which takes history as a witness to the exceptional nature of Zionism in Jewish history. It explains many points of discord between the political ideology of Zionism and what most people consider Judaism. It also shows how Jewish traditional conscience offers a hope for the solution of the Middle East crisis. The conflicts in Israel/Palestine acquire a different meaning when seen in the context of Jewish opposition to Zionism. This book has attracted Jewish and non-Jewish readers alike who find this story inspiring in today's world of mobile identities.

Zionism and Judaism

Author: David Novak
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131624122X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
Why should anyone be a Zionist, a supporter of a Jewish state in the land of Israel? Why should there be a Jewish state in the land of Israel? This book seeks to provide a philosophical answer to these questions. Although a Zionist need not be Jewish, nonetheless this book argues that Zionism is only a coherent political stance when it is intelligently rooted in Judaism, especially in the classical Jewish doctrine of God's election of the people of Israel and the commandment to them to settle the land of Israel. The religious Zionism advocated here is contrasted with secular versions of Zionism that take Zionism to be a replacement of Judaism. It is also contrasted with versions of religious Zionism that ascribe messianic significance to the State of Israel, or which see the main task of religious Zionism to be the establishment of an Israeli theocracy.

The Jewish State

Author: Yoram Hazony
Publisher:
ISBN: 0786747234
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Book Description
In what may be the most controversial book on Zionism and Israel published in the last twenty years, Yoram Hazony graphically portrays the cultural and political revolt against Israel's status as the Jewish state. Examining ideological trends in academia, literature, media, law, the armed forces, and the foreign policy establishment, Hazony contends that Israelis are preparing themselves for the final break with the Jewish past and the Jewish future. In a dramatic new reading of Israeli history, Hazony uncovers the story of how Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and other German-Jewish intellectuals bitterly fought against the establishment of Israel, and later used the Hebrew University as a base for deposing David Ben-Gurion and discrediting Labor Zionism. The Jewish State is a must-read for anyone concerned with Israel's present and future.

The Political Philosophy of Zionism

Author: Eyal Chowers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139502956
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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.

Zionism

Author: Milton Viorst
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250078008
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Book Description
From serving as the Middle East correspondent for The New Yorker to penning articles for the New York Times, Milton Viorst has dedicated his career to studying the Middle East. Now, in this new book, Viorst examines the evolution of Zionism, from its roots by serving as a cultural refuge for Europe's Jews, to the cover it provides today for Israel's exercise of control over millions of Arabs in occupied territories. Beginning with the shattering of the traditional Jewish society during the Enlightenment, Viorst covers the recent history of the Jews, from the spread of Jewish Emancipation during the French Revolution Era to the rise of the exclusionary anti-Semitism that overwhelmed Europe in the late nineteenth century. Viorst examines how Zionism was born and follows its development through the lives and ideas of its dominant leaders, who all held only one tenet in common: that Jews, for the first time in two millennia, must determine their own destiny to save themselves. But, in regards to creating a Jewish state with a military that dominates the region, Viorst argues that Israel has squandered the goodwill it enjoyed at its founding, and thus the country has put its own future on very uncertain footing. With the expertise and knowledge garnered from decades of studying this contentious region, Milton Viorst deftly exposes the risks that Israel faces today.

Balfour's Shadow

Author: David Cronin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781786801081
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 186

Book Description
The story of the rhetorical and practical assistance that Britain has given to the Zionist movement and the state of Israel since 1917.

The Question of Zion

Author: Jacqueline Rose
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400826527
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Book Description
Zionism was inspired as a movement--one driven by the search for a homeland for the stateless and persecuted Jewish people. Yet it trampled the rights of the Arabs in Palestine. Today it has become so controversial that it defies understanding and trumps reasoned public debate. So argues prominent British writer Jacqueline Rose, who uses her political and psychoanalytic skills in this book to take an unprecedented look at Zionism--one of the most powerful ideologies of modern times. Rose enters the inner world of the movement and asks a new set of questions. How did Zionism take shape as an identity? And why does it seem so immutable? Analyzing the messianic fervor of Zionism, she argues that it colors Israel's most profound self-image to this day. Rose also explores the message of dissidents, who, while believing themselves the true Zionists, warned at the outset against the dangers of statehood for the Jewish people. She suggests that these dissidents were prescient in their recognition of the legitimate claims of the Palestinian Arabs. In fact, she writes, their thinking holds the knowledge the Jewish state needs today in order to transform itself. In perhaps the most provocative part of her analysis, Rose proposes that the link between the Holocaust and the founding of the Jewish state, so often used to justify Israel's policies, needs to be rethought in terms of the shame felt by the first leaders of the nation toward their own European history. For anyone concerned with the conflict in Israel-Palestine, this timely book offers a unique understanding of Zionism as an unavoidable psychic and historical force.

The Invention of the Land of Israel

Author: Shlomo Sand
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1844679462
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
What is a homeland and when does it become a national territory? Why have so many people been willing to die for such places throughout the twentieth century? What is the essence of the Promised Land? Following the acclaimed and controversial The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand examines the mysterious sacred land that has become the site of the longest-running national struggle of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Invention of the Land of Israel deconstructs the age-old legends surrounding the Holy Land and the prejudices that continue to suffocate it. Sand’s account dissects the concept of “historical right” and tracks the creation of the modern concept of the “Land of Israel” by nineteenth-century Evangelical Protestants and Jewish Zionists. This invention, he argues, not only facilitated the colonization of the Middle East and the establishment of the State of Israel; it is also threatening the existence of the Jewish state today.