A skillful navigation through turbulent waters.
A penetrating if often redundant study of the original Zionist vision of an Israel that is both democratic and Jewish.
Rubinstein (The Zionist Dream Revisited, 1984) has been a member of Israel’s parliament or cabinet since 1977. Here he responds to the “post-Zionist” attacks on Israel’s ethnic schizophrenia by stating that Israel was meant to be, and should remain, a democratic and secular state—as well as a Jewish state. Fittingly, in his preface, Arthur Hertzberg traces the author’s thinking back to both the Whig party and the Talmud. Ehud Barak’s foreword, on the other hand, contends that “the Zionist idea is not carved in stone”—somewhat ironic given the source of both Zionism and that particular expression. Rubinstein’s opening chapters recall how Zionism was originally envisioned as a movement that aimed to replace the parasitical “Diaspora Yid” (the author quotes Jabotinsky’s harsh terms) with the historically corrected Hebrew, happily tilling his native soil. Herzl envisioned Israel becoming a kind of miniature Switzerland, rather than an insular, xenophobic ghetto transplanted to the Middle East. To the author, the Holocaust answered the question of the need for a Jewish haven or a Law of Return (offering instant citizenship only to Jewish immigrants). He is nevertheless wary of a growing Jewish fundamentalism, and he sees the Rabin assassination as the climax of current distortions of Judaism and Zionism. Far more than the early Zionists, Rubinstein tolerates religious influence—he merely wants such influence departmentalized behind walls that separate the State from the Temple. The author describes the Jewish national home as a condominium whose separate apartments belong to all the tenants, and argues that a Jewish state can balance and fly on twin engines.
A skillful navigation through turbulent waters.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2000
ISBN: 0-8419-1408-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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