A readable, provocative rejoinder to Tom Segev’s 1967, Gershom Gorenberg’s The Accidental Empire and other recent works on...
Must one be Zionist to be Israeli, or even Jewish? Historian Brecher, former director of the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem, ponders the question.
The author, born in Tel Aviv but long resident in his parents’ native Germany, returned to Israel in the 1960s. In Germany, he writes, “most parents of the Jewish children I grew up with made do with abstract, summary remarks when their experiences during the persecution came up.” In Israel, conversely, his historian colleagues “wanted to steer me out of the darkness and confusion of the Diaspora” and urged him to embrace a vision of a Jewish people living in a secular culture in which they were neither oppressed nor assimilated, or assimilated to the extent that its members were “new Jews,” namely Israelis, ethnically dominant in a country of their own. “How could I, as a German Jew, accept such a nationalistic principle of nation and nationality?” writes Brecher. He could not, it develops, for he became convinced that such status was possible only at the expense of the land’s Arab inhabitants. Though surrounded by 100 million Arabs, he urges, Israel is the Goliath of lore, a modern industrial nation with a powerful army set against corrupt and ineffectual countries that could not manage even to feed their own people. His views earned him enemies and cost him a certain amount of influence in his work as a military historian, but, as he writes in this combination of memoir and history, he pressed his case as a lecturer and as an activist in the nascent Israeli peace movement. Only when Israeli society acknowledges the injustices the nation has committed, he concludes, will that peace be possible, though “this is predicated on a political maturity . . . that is not yet in evidence.”
A readable, provocative rejoinder to Tom Segev’s 1967, Gershom Gorenberg’s The Accidental Empire and other recent works on modern Israel.Pub Date: July 10, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59051-211-1
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“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.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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