Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83239 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-21
• Released on: 2009-07-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.30" h x 6.30" w x 9.40" l, 1.44 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780374177782
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Reading the Bible and Jewish history both literally and symbolically, this eclectic and passionate, wide-ranging history of Israel and Zionism by the author of Tough Jews decodes the story of Jonah in the whale's belly as the Diaspora Jew in Nazi concentration camps. Cohen catalogues the accomplishments of first-century Jewish scholar Jonathan ben Zakkai in the way Willie Dixon catalogues a man's deeds in a blues song, and summons Kierkegaard and Allen Ginsberg as he muses about Abraham, a crazy old man willing to murder his son to earn God's blessing: Everything in Judaism is a repetition of this scene, Cohen asserts. Of Herzl, he says it was his career writing whimsical newspaper essays that made his mind fluid and open to the vision of Zionism. He sees Ariel Sharon as a tragic Shakespearean character who was driven to dismantle the settlements in Gaza out of a great love for Israel. Finally, Cohen does not believe that the Holocaust justifies the state of Israel—or that Israel needs to be justified. Cohen's idiosyncratic yet often lyrical take on Israel is sometimes exasperating but always deeply felt and refreshing. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Stephen Reiss When the Romans laid siege to Jerusalem in A.D. 70, there was no such thing as the Geneva Conventions. Thousands of prisoners were crucified. So many trees were cut down to make battering rams and other wall-busting weapons that the hills around the city were denuded. The Second Temple, the center of a nation and a religion, was destroyed by fire. Sixty-odd years later, there was another Jewish revolt. This time, the Roman effort at obliteration was even more thorough. One account estimated that 90 percent of the Judean population died. Jews were banned from Jerusalem and its environs. The city was renamed after the Emperor Hadrian, and a shrine to Jupiter was built on the Temple Mount. Miraculously, this was not the end of the Jewish nation. It survived, in part, by redefining Jerusalem. Led by their rabbis, the Jewish people substituted an ideal, the city on a hill, for the physical city. The rituals and animal sacrifices practiced in the Temple were replaced by prayer and study. "They turned the Temple into a book," writes Rich Cohen in his fascinating but flawed new book, "Israel Is Real." "You can burn a city, but you cannot sack an idea, or kill a book." After two millennia, Jerusalem is once more the capital of a Jewish nation. The idea has taken on concrete form and is beset by a host of real-world problems. Once again, a Jewish nation is vulnerable to its enemies and its own internal weaknesses. Is the future of the religion, too, now hostage to the foibles of people like Binyamin Netanyahu and Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah? It's an interesting thesis, but a curious book. While "Israel Is Real" aims for historical sweep, starting in the first century A.D. and ending with the 2004 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, it's much too idiosyncratic in its choice of subjects to be a definitive account. It feels almost like a child's field trip through the local art museum, stopping here to look at an oil painting, there to make faces at a marble bust. Despite the cover's promise that the book will be "an obsessive quest," it's not a memoir, either. The author gives us only the barest sketch of his life and travels to the Mideast. And despite the main title, nor is it a book about the "real" Israel. It's too preoccupied with fanatics, politicians and generals -- especially Ariel Sharon, whose life Cohen sees as a metaphor for the nation. We hear almost nothing from ordinary people. In addition, this is an Israel seen through a distinctly American lens. There's no sign of the Sephardim, the Jews whose origins lie in the Arab world and who have been skeptical of peace deals. There's no mention of Russian Jews and their battle to emigrate from the Soviet Union. Cohen approvingly quotes historian Yuri Slezkine on how Zionism was an effort to make Jews "normal," to take a holy language -- Hebrew -- and a holy land and make them both part of "everyday life." Yet there's little sense of the quotidian here: commuting to work, raising the kids, going to the movies or out for a meal. Instead, we spend a lot of time with fanatics on West Bank hilltops. True, those handfuls of people wield outsize political influence, but they don't define the daily life of the nation. While he writes with undeniable energy, Cohen has a weakness for weird and distracting cultural references. The Zealots of the First Century "carried little knives, which they wielded in the manner of the Tongs, the Chinese gangs of New York." An influential rabbi's escape from Jerusalem is compared to the last scene in "Star Wars" in which Darth Vader escapes the explosion of the Death Star. To early Jewish mystics, "Heaven is structured like a video game." At first, I thought this was an attempt at popularization, but the references are so random that it feels more like a game of free association. But the main flaw of "Israel Is Real" is that it treats religious faith as a form of madness. Cohen calls the 1967 capture of East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount "the moment the Jews went batty." Religious Zionists or others who favor a unified Jerusalem suffer from a "syndrome." It might be argued that the long-term viability of Israel lies in the triumph of secular Enlightenment values. Perhaps only a nation that has stopped mourning the destruction of the Second Temple can make the compromises necessary to achieve peace with the Palestinians and the nations of the Muslim world. But that's not the reality on the ground today. And that line of reasoning seems oddly dismissive of the faith that sustained a people for 2,000 years. Believe it or not, that's real, too.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review

Customer Reviews

A Modern and Incredibly American Story About Israel
...and the best book I've read about that country: smart, funny, brilliant, incredibly alive. I picked this book up on a Saturday and finished it on Tuesday, after racing across 2000 years of history, desert, and some of the most unbelievable characters and settings I've ever encountered in a book. The even weirder thing is that they're all real. The false messiahs of the 1600s. The New Orleans Fruit Salesman who topples South American governments and helps the UN vote in the state of Israel. The turncoat Josephus who survives the destructioin of Israel (Israel gets destroyed like five times in the book; if it was a movie, it'd have a mongo special effects budget) and so lives to give the rest of us the story. The tank commander who helps single-handedly win a war. It's not just that I understand a topic I couldn't quite see my way through before, because any decent book will do that. This book is a thrilling story, a wake-you-up story, a modern story. It's a story I felt I was listening to, in a crowded room, with a breathless teller. I've read other Cohen books, so I came to this one as a fan. This book is the reason you become one. It's like opening a door and having a whole world blast out at you. I've never read a book, a true book (in both senses) like it.

A Story Well Told
This is not a book for Jews. Or rather, this is not a book only for Jews. It is simply a wonderful book. Cohen tells the history of Judaism not as a scholarly chronology but as a simple story, with a beginning (the destruction of the Second Temple), a middle (the two millennia during which Judaism existed only as an idea, without a land), and an end (the Zionist movement and the creation of Israel). He gives dimension to the characters you know--your Theodore Herzls, your Moshe Dayans--and focuses on ones you may not, like Sam the Banana Man, who each carry the whole story within them. A huge part of the appeal is Cohen's prose, propelled by biblical rhythms (Ariel Sharon "sinned as David sinned. He sinned as Abraham sinned") and playful associations (comparing the West Bank settlers, for example, to Travis Bickle, Mickey Mouse, and Malcom X in the same paragraph). Wow.

Mixing this book up with another author's!
Some of these reviewers seem to be confusing Rich Cohen, the author of this book, with Richard Cohen, a columnist for the Washington Post, who did indeed speak of the creation of Israel as a mistake. Two different guys, two different world views, and an indication that the above title is being reviewed by people who have never read the book. I feel compelled to write because I have read the book, and it changed the way I read the news and think of the trickiest region on the globe. The fact is Rich (RICH) Cohen's book, while asking probing questions and looking squarely and honestly at the dangers face by Israel, is a love song to the Jewish state, the Jewish people and the men and women who built that state. You come away from the book with a deep understanding and appreciation of the leaders of the Zionist movement and the great distance the people have crossed. The fact that this book has been sniped at by both those who hate Israel and those whole love Israel without critical faculty is a sure sign the author is honest and thus treading on territory even more dangerous than the Gaza Strip--the truth.