Israel is real /
In AD 70, when the Second Temple was destroyed, a handful of visionaries saved Judaism by reinventing it--by taking what had been a national religion and turning it into an idea. Jews no longer needed Jerusalem to be Jews. Whenever a Jew studied--wherever he was--he would be in the holy city. But in...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2009.
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| Edition: | 1st ed. |
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | In AD 70, when the Second Temple was destroyed, a handful of visionaries saved Judaism by reinventing it--by taking what had been a national religion and turning it into an idea. Jews no longer needed Jerusalem to be Jews. Whenever a Jew studied--wherever he was--he would be in the holy city. But in our own time, Zionists have turned the book back into a temple. In Rich Cohen's new history of the Zionist idea and the Jewish state--the history of a nation chronicled as if it were the biography of a person--he brings to life dozens of figures, each driven by the same impulse: to reach Jerusalem. From false messiahs to the early Zionists, to the iconic figures of David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir Cohen shows how all these lives together form a single story. He examines the myth of the wandering Jew, the paradox of Jewish power, and the triumph and tragedy of the Jewish state.--From publisher description. |
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| Physical Description: | x, 383 pages : map ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages [355]-360) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780374177782 (hardcover : alk. paper) 0374177783 (hardcover : alk. paper) |