The Zionist Paradox
ISBN: 9781611686029
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / Brandeis University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: National characteristics Israeli in literature.; Jews; Israeli fiction; Hebrew fiction; Zionism in literature.;

Many contemporary Israelis suffer from a strange condition. Despite the obvious successes of the Zionist enterprise and the State of Israel, tension persists, with a collective sense that something is wrong and should be better. This cognitive dissonance arises from the disjunction between "place" (defined as what Israel is really like) and "Place" (defined as the imaginary community comprised of history, myth, and dream). Through the lens of five major works in Hebrew by writers Abraham Mapu (1853), Theodor Herzl (1902), Yosef Luidor (1912), Moshe Shamir (1948), and Amos Oz (1963), Schwartz unearths the core of this paradox as it evolves over one hundred years, from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s.

MONIKA SCHWARZ-FRIESEL holds the chair in general linguistics at the Technical University Berlin. She is the author of several books on antisemitism and the power of language. JEHUDA REINHARZ is Richard Koret Professor of Modern Jewish History and director of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry at Brandeis University. He is the president of the Mandel Foundation.

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