First published in German in 1896, "The Jewish State" is the important political treatise arguing in favor of creating an independent Jewish country by Theodor Herzl, the Austro-Hungarian playwright, journalist and political activist. Herzel was born in 1860 in Budapest, Hungary, and raised by an Orthodox Jewish father and an unobservant Jewish mother. He became the founder of the World Zionist Organization and was such an influential figure in the...

In this lively intellectual history of the political Left, cultural critic Susie Linfield investigates how eight prominent twentieth-century intellectuals struggled with the philosophy of Zionism, and then with Israel and its conflicts with the Arab world. Constructed as a series of interrelated portraits that combine the personal and the political, the book includes philosophers, historians, journalists, and activists such as Hannah Arendt, Arthur...

Zeev Sternhell is Léon Blum Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is the author, among works in several languages, of Neither Right nor Left and The Birth of Fascist Ideology, both published by Princeton University Press. The well-known historian and political scientist Zeev Sternhell here advances a radically new interpretation of the founding of modern Israel. The founders claimed that they intended to create...

As the Middle East conflict enters its most violent phase, Tom Segev offers a lively, contentious polemic against cherished and rigid notions of Israel's national unity and culture. In his many works of history, Tom Segev has challenged the entrenched understanding of crucial moments in Israel's past. Now, in a short, sharp, polemical book, Segev has turned his sights from Israeli history to confront some revered assumptions about the country today. Drawing...

The Balfour Declaration paints an indelible picture of how Arab nationalists, backed by Britain, fought for their future as Zionists in England battled diplomatically for influence. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to either side or even to most members of the British government, Prime Minister David Lloyd George was telling Turkey that she could keep her flag flying over the disputed territory if only she would agree to a separate peace.

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012" Ze'ev Rosenkranz is senior editor at the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology and a former curator of the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His books include The Einstein Scrapbook. Was Einstein a Zionist? Albert Einstein was initially skeptical and even disdainful of the Zionist movement, yet he affiliated himself with this controversial...

In The New American Zionism, Theodore Sasson challenges the conventional view of waning American Jewish support for Israel. Instead, he shows that we are in the midst of a shift from a "mobilization" approach, which first emerged with the new state and focused on supporting Israel through big, centralized organizations, to an "engagement" approach marked by direct and personal relations with the Jewish state. Today, growing numbers of American...

Why Israel's greatest weakness is its greatest strength, and what its supporters and enemies can learn from its success Israel's critics in the West insist that no country founded on a single religion or culture can stay democratic and prosperous? But they're wrong. In The Promise of Israel, Daniel Gordis points out that Israel has defied that conventional wisdom. It has provided its citizens infinitely greater liberty and prosperity than anyone expected,...

"A groundbreaking work that overturns the conventional understanding of the Israeli-American relationship and, in doing so, explores how fundamental debates about American identity drive our country's foreign policy"--

"Every nation has narratives or stories it tells itself about its history, but which typically contain factually false or misleading mythologies that often result in devastating consequences for itself and for others. In the case of Israel and its indispensable ally, the United States, the central mythology is "the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity," as the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban famously said in a 1973 statement that has...