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THE JEWISH STATE

Name: THE JEWISH STATE
Author: Yoram Hazony
ISBN: 0-465-02901-9

AN IDEA AND ITS BETRAYAL

by Yoram Hazony ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2000

Chapter notes and bibliography attest to Hazony's wellprepared, impassioned defense for history's most defenseless people.

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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

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

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GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

by Jack Weatherford ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 2, 2004

A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.

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“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”

No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.

A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.