A book you should read, part 2

I should have recommended this a long time ago

Yoram Hazony is a thinker. He’s an Israeli philosopher and pundit. He’s Modern Orthodox, and brilliant*

That caveat aside, his book The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel's Soul is nothing less than brilliant. Part of the book’s own description says this:

In a dramatic new reading of Israeli history, Hazony uncovers the story of how Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and other German-Jewish intellectuals bitterly fought against the establishment of Israel, and later used the Hebrew University as a base for deposing David Ben-Gurion and discrediting Labor Zionism.

The book itself is 464 pages long, and since it’s 23 years old, Amazon is (as of this writing) selling the paperback for $18.69, which is a significant drop from the cover price of $24.99. That’s a great deal.

Full disclosure, these links are affiliate links. That means that if you click through and eventually decide to buy the book, the price will be the same for you, but Amazon will throw a few pennies my way, too.

The whole book is astounding, but the most important part of it, in my view, is the first section, which goes through the history of the state before there was a state, and shows how the current leftist elite establishment (political, academic, media) came to be.

This is not the stuff we were taught in Hebrew school. And it’s not the stuff, of course, that’s taught to students in Israel today. Though it should be.

It’s one thing to know that the left does not have the good of the Jewish State in mind. It’s another to understand that this position stretches back over a century and a half, and is strongly rooted. So strongly rooted that doing anything about them will require heroic measures.

Let me know if you want me to go into detail about any of the material Hazony presents. Though I can’t do it any better than he has.

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*I wrongly described Hazony as being “Open Orthodox”, for which I apologize. I was misled by another site’s description of him, and should have checked it more carefully.