A succinct, polemical debate urging the neutralization of the power of this religious minority for the good of Israeli...
Two engaged journalists offer an anxious look at how the “ultras” gained their troubling political supremacy over a secular state.
Veteran journalists Elizur and Malkin take on the ultra-Orthodox with knuckles bared. Despite the founding of Israel as a “state for Jews” and not a “Jewish state,” David Ben-Gurion made a fateful compromise with the ultra-Orthodox party in order to gain support for statehood—with ramifications that are still felt today. The ultra-Orthodox Haredim create in their close-knit communities a deeply religious, segregated lifestyle: little exposure to the outside world, employment or schools and exemption from the requisite three-year military service—in short, an ideological fringe made up of 10 percent of the population that nonetheless holds obstructionist political power because of the clout, and subsidies, it has maintained traditionally by siding with the conservative Likud party. Indeed, in that founding compromise with Ben-Gurion, the ultra-Orthodox were awarded for their compliance the regulation of certain important aspects of daily life, namely Sabbath observance, dietary laws, marriage, divorce and education. And because Israel still hasn’t managed to hammer out a constitution (including basic equal rights for women), the ultras still hold a lock on deciding who is a Jew, how people can marry and what is closed on the Sabbath. By rejecting secular influences, even the teaching of English and mathematics in their religious schools, the Haredim leaders keep control over their flock, the authors maintain, while impeding national progress and possibilities for peace and reconciliation in the country as a whole.
A succinct, polemical debate urging the neutralization of the power of this religious minority for the good of Israeli society.Pub Date: March 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1468303452
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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
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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