Israel is Real: An Obssessive Quest to Understand the Jewish Nation and Its History - Hardcover

Cohen, Rich

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374177783 ISBN 13: 9780374177782

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009

Synopsis

“It’s a great irony that Israel was more secure as an idea than it’s ever been as a nation with an army.”

 

In AD 70, when the Second Temple was destroyed, a handful of visionaries saved Judaism by reinventing it—by taking what had been a national religion, identified with a particular place, and turning it into an idea. Jews no longer needed Jerusalem to be Jews. Whenever a Jew studied—wherever he was—he would be in the holy city. In this way, a few rabbis turned a real city into a city of the mind; in this way, they turned the Temple into a book and preserved their faith. Though you can burn a city, you cannot sack an idea or kill a book. But in our own time, Zionists have turned the book back into a

temple. And unlike an idea, a temple can be destroyed. The creation of Israel has made Jews vulnerable in a way they have not been for two thousand years.

 

In Israel Is Real, Rich Cohen’s superb new history of the Zionist idea and the Jewish state—the history of a nation chronicled as if it were the biography of a person—he brings to life dozens of fascinating figures, each driven by the same impulse: to reach Jerusalem. From false messiahs such as David Alroy (Cohen calls him the first superhero, with his tallis as a cape) and Sabbatai Zevi, who led thousands on a mad spiritual journey, to the early Zionists (many of them failed journalists), to the iconic figures of modern Jewish Sparta, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, and Ariel Sharon, Cohen shows how all these lives together form a single story, a single life. In this unique book, Cohen examines the myth of the wandering Jew, the paradox of Jewish power (how can you be both holy and nuclear?), and the triumph and tragedy of the Jewish state—how the creation of modern Israel has changed what it means to be a Jew anywhere.

About this title

About the Author

RICH COHEN is the author of Sweet and Low (FSG, 2006), Tough Jews, The Avengers, The Record Men, and the memoir Lake Effect. His work has appeared in many major publications, and he is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. He lives with his family in Connecticut.

Reviews

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.

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.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374177783
• ISBN 13: 9780374177782
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400