The Bookshelf

by Rabbi Neil Gillman

The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader. Edited with an Introduction and Biographical Notes by Arthur Hertzberg. A Herzl Press publication, The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1960

A classic. The recently deceased Arthur Hertzberg, distinguished rabbi and historian of the modern Jewish experience, provides a 100-page introduction to this generous anthology of writings by 37 Zionist thinkers, beginning with the 19th century “precursors” (Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai and Moses Hess) through Herzl, Nordau, Ahad Ha-Am and Bialik, and up to Martin Buber, Mordecai Kaplan, Jabotinsky, Weizmann, and Ben-Gurion, to cite only some of the most noteworthy. Hertzberg also introduces each individual selection, adds footnotes, and lists his sources. His extended introduction is a model of accessible scholarship. Do not be deceived by the original date of publication. This anthology never has been duplicated, and every page teems with implications for the issues that confront us to this day.

Abraham Joshua Heschel. Israel: An Echo of Eternity. New Introduction by Susannah Heschel. Illustrated with line drawings by Abraham Rattner. A Jewish Lights Classic Reprint, 1997

Partially a review of recent Jewish history, partially reflections on Heschel’s ongoing theological concerns (the eclipse of the Bible, the significance of memory, the tension between space and time), but largely a poem to the place of land, state, and Jerusalem in the Jewish historical consciousness, this book, originally published in 1967 in the wake of the Six Day War, merits a new and younger readership. Note particularly the chapters addressed to Christians and Arabs. Every paragraph reflects Heschel’s distinctive style. An index of people and places and a second index of biblical and later citations are particularly helpful.

Gershom Gorenberg. The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. The Free Press, 2000

Indispensable reading for anyone who seeks to understand recent headlines on the interplay of radical Christian, Muslim, and Jewish impulses in shaping the politics of the Middle East. The author, senior editor and columnist for the Jerusalem Report and contributor to many American publications, understands apocalyptic religion and how theology can affect and infect politics. He traces how Christian evangelicals, Muslim fundamentalists, and the Israeli settler movement share a biblically based messianic fervor, with its clear militaristic implications. This fervor is to accomplish what conventional diplomacy has failed to do. Effectively, these believers would force God’s hand – but whose God, and to what ends? Scary reading but vitally important.

Yehuda Amichai. Open Closed Open, Poems. Translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld. Harcourt, Inc., 2000

The last collection by Israel’s late and most beloved modern poet. The themes are daily life in Israel, love, women, nature, Jerusalem, and the Holocaust. But many of these creations have an overlay of hardly conventional theological musings, which lend them an (again, hardly conventional) liturgical quality. Striking in Amichai is his language and his metaphors: concrete, down-to-earth, everyday. “After Auschwitz, no theology:/the numbers on the forearms/of the inmates of extermination/are the telephone numbers of God,/numbers that do not answer/and now are disconnected, one by one.” A treasure.