Chapter notes and bibliography attest to Hazony's wellprepared, impassioned defense for history's most defenseless people.
A history of and challenge to the Israeli antiZionist elite that threatens to deJudaize the Jewish state.
Hazony, a former Netanyahu aide and a contributor to periodicals like Commentary, is president of the Shalem Center think tank. His call to plug the leaking dike comes right after ``postZionist'' pundits rewrote Israel’s history books to read that undermanned Arab forces in 1948 were overwhelmed by a Zionist army that brutally caused the Arab refugee problem. Agreeing with the UN that Zionism is racism, these idealists contend that power, at least for Jews, corrupts. The Holocaust forced statehood, but these ``intellectuals, even in Israel, never became fully reconciled to the empowerment . . . entailed in the creation of a Jewish state.'' In Jerusalem in 1958 Martin Buber equated Zionism with ``the way of Hitler,'' and a guiltcleared world has often echoed the canard that Israeli soldiers are comparable to Nazis. Hazony traces the predecessors of today's postZionists to influential thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Judah Magnes, and Albert Einstein. The author documents how this once marginal clique of antinationalists got a toehold at Hebrew University, fought Zionists from David BenGurion on down, controlled the media, and now work to transform Israel into a binational state whose army is no longer mandated to protect Jews (say, in Entebbe) and whose national flag and anthem will be Jewfree. From the protocols of the elders of antiZionism, Hazony follows the pedigree to Shimon Peres, whose global New Middle East intends to eradicate nationalism and reduce the Jews to the influence of the Druse. A particular target of these messianic atheists is the Law of Return, which grants instant citizenship to Jewish immigrants only. The author believes Israel's many nonJews who accompanied RussianJewish immigrants to the nation have given anti-Zionism its suddenly sizable support.
Chapter notes and bibliography attest to Hazony's wellprepared, impassioned defense for history's most defenseless people. (First serial to the New Republic; author tour)Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-465-02901-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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