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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.… (more)
User reviews
As an aside, my least favorite part of reading Israel is Real was stopping to read the extensive footnote at the bottom of nearly every page. While the footnotes contained interesting information, it was like hitting every single red light and getting behind every student - laden school bus on the way to work.