At once a studied academic investigation and a highly accessible contribution to popular debate, Rosenthal’s account treads...
A cogent exploration of the evolving relationship between Israel and American Jewry, from early Zionism through to the present day.
Rosenthal (The Politics of Dependency, 1980) presents a remarkably even-handed account of this ever-shifting interdependence through the analysis of certain key events in Israel’s history (viz., the invasion of Lebanon, the Pollard affair, the Intifada, and the “Who is a Jew” controversy). The author argues that the past two decades have seen a radical transformation in the nature of American Jewish support for Israel. Although America’s Jewish diaspora traditionally presented a public face of unconditional support and uncritical generosity, Rosenthal argues that there is now a great deal of fragmentation and dissent. He explains this shift as the consequence of mounting debate over Israel’s defense and security policies, its increasing wealth, its changing population, the intransigence of its right wing, and the efforts of Orthodox authorities to relegate Conservative and Reform Judaism to second-class status. This two-pronged argument suggests not only that American Jews have become disenchanted with Israel, but that the passing of time has exorcised the specter of the Holocaust (and thereby removed Zionism’s primary raison d’être). It is this combination of events in the early 1980s that lifted American Jewry’s decades-old gag rule on public criticism of the state and opened the floodgates for political dissent, a transition that Rosenthal terms “a natural reflection of the fragmentation of Israeli politics.” This work is notable first and foremost because it introduces a fresh and much-needed social perspective into a field that is overrun with political and historical analyses, and secondly because the author has labored so effectively to present a balanced story.
At once a studied academic investigation and a highly accessible contribution to popular debate, Rosenthal’s account treads a careful path though a polemical minefield.Pub Date: April 6, 2001
ISBN: 0-87451-897-0
Page Count: 248
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
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 Yorker staff 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
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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