by Avraham Burg ; translated by Joel Greenberg ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 9, 2018
A heartfelt synthesis of a coming-of-age story, a political jeremiad, a memoir, and a manifesto.
A leftist Israeli activist delivers a singular sermon explaining what needs urgent repair in the Jewish democracy.
Burg (The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise from Its Ashes, 2008, etc.), once the speaker of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, and a past leader of the World Zionist Federation and the Jewish Agency for Israel, has renounced politics. His father, a political leader of the founding generation, was a religious Zionist. The author took a more liberal course, discarding religious orthodoxy. He describes himself as a “Protestant Jew.” Eventually, Burg became disillusioned with the Labor Party in whose government he served. He could not abide the perceived deceit, abuse, and lies that are endemic to governing. Israel started to go wrong, he asserts, with victory in the Six-Day War. He was 12 then and a student at a yeshiva. His revered father, in his government post, did not thwart settlements in Palestinian territory. Matters became worse after the Yom Kippur War, and then came the carnage, much of it sponsored by Ariel Sharon. It is clear to Burg that Israel lost its way; like him, he argues, the nation must become more cosmopolitan. He feels as at home in Vienna as he does in Jerusalem. To him, a “European Jew,” fellow Jews are not just Israelis. Now in his 60s, Burg’s youthful idealism remains unabated, and he urges separation of church and state. To solve the land’s most pressing dilemma, he envisions two states in a sort of confederation, one that will be a source of amity and attract other nation-states. Integration, not separation! Thus, the author proposes difficult, even frighteningly dangerous courses of action, and he will surely be called a dreamer and a false prophet by many opponents. But what, he might reply, are the better paths?
A heartfelt synthesis of a coming-of-age story, a political jeremiad, a memoir, and a manifesto.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-56858-978-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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