Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City - Hardcover

Wasserstein, Bernard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300091648 ISBN 13: 9780300091649

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2001

Synopsis

In this timely book, Bernard Wasserstein offers the first authoritative history of the fraught diplomatic relations surrounding the Holy City of Jerusalem. Jews, Muslims, and Christians have all claimed the city as their own over the centuries--as have a dizzying array of foreign nations. In the period between the founding of the city and its capture by Israelis in 1967, Jerusalem has been conquered at least thirty-seven times. "No other town," wrote Arthur Koestler in 1948, "has caused such continuous waves of killing, rape, and unholy misery over the centuries as the Holy City." Today, Jerusalem lies at the core of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It is the most deeply divided capital city in the world: its Arab and Jewish residents inhabit different districts, speak different languages, attend different schools, read different newspapers, observe different holy days-- live, in almost every significant respect, different lives. Against the background of renewed violence in and around Jerusalem, this book explores the complicated origins of the current diplomatic impasse. Why is the question of Jerusalem so intractable? Why has it outlasted almost every other political dispute as a focus for diplomatic wrangling and collective violence? And what are the prospects for resolution? Meticulously researched, and written with humanity and elegance, this book offers an illuminating contribution to the effort to achieve a lasting negotiated settlement of a tragic conflict that affects us all.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Praise for the first edition:

"A lively and provocative new history. . . . Wasserstein has produced a crisply written and irony-laced account of the city that may well have more history per capita than any other." -Thomas W. Lippman, Washington Post Book World

"Wasserstein . . . writes clearly and dispassionately on a theme that has been more cliché-ridden than most and long monopolized by propagandists and hucksters. . . . His book is the most sober and in many ways the fairest description I know of official positions and popular sentiments on both sides between 1967 and 1999." -Amos Elon, New York Review of Books

Named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post Book World and the Economist

About the Author

Bernard Wasserstein is professor of history at the University of Glasgow. The president of the Jewish Historical Society of England, he is the author of many books, including The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (published by Yale University Press) and Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe since 1945.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0300091648
• ISBN 13: 9780300091649
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432