An American journalist offers an elegant, deeply honest look at the failure of Jewish liberalism in forging Israel as a democratic state.
Founded in the spirit of Jewish liberalism, Israel promised in its declaration of independence to ensure “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” Yet successive wars stripped not only rights but basic humanity from much of its population, namely the Palestinians, creating a terrible irony for Zionists, especially in America. Daily Beast senior political writer Beinart (Journalism and Political Science/City Univ. of New York; The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, 2010, etc.) represents a liberal, non-Orthodox tradition among fairly young Jews for whom Judaism and social justice go hand in hand, and who no longer buy the line of Jewish “victimhood” that helped cohere their parents’ generation of postwar Holocaust survivors. Unlike their parents, who saw anti-Semitism lurking everywhere, younger liberal Jews recognize Jewish power and the need for ethical responsibility in exercising that power. Violence, occupation and racism have eroded the good Zionist soul, Beinart writes, yet the powerful Jewish organizations in America often deny these ills. For example, AIPAC, today’s most powerful Jewish lobby, did not find its financial legs until the elections of Menachem Begin and Ronald Reagan, using Israel’s entrenched sense of being a “victim-state” as its fundraising card. As these organizations moved away from their roots in civil liberties and turned toward a solipsistic tribalism, political pressure in Washington moved the same way, as evinced by the retreat by President Obama—whom Beinart considers a leader in the true Jewish liberal tradition—on West Bank settlements and Palestinian statehood. Is the occupation Israel’s fault, and should American Jews criticize Israel? Beinart delves into the hypocritical waffling and rhetorical absurdities. Straight talk by a clear-thinking intellectual with his heart in the right place.
Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9412-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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