Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders' Dreams?

WINNER OF THE RABBI SACKS BOOK PRIZE

A nuanced examination of the Israel’s past, present, and future, after reaching its seventy-fifth anniversary and enduring its most challenging year ever, from the two-time National Jewish Book Award–winning author of Israel. Revised and updated throughout for the paperback edition.

In 1948, Israel’s founders sought a “national home for the Jewish people,” a core tenet of Zionism where Jewish life would be transformed. The state they ultimately made, says Daniel Gordis, is a place of extraordinary success and maddening disappointment, a story of both unprecedented human triumph and great suffering.

When it marked its seventy-fifth anniversary, Israel was in the throes of a judicial reform crisis that tested the limits of its democracy, its most dangerous internal rupture ever. Then, with the October 7th War, it was attacked from the outside and plunged into existential uncertainty. In light of those first seventy-five years and the events of 2023 that shook the country to its core, Gordis asks: Has Israel fulfilled the dreams of its founders?

Using Israel’s Declaration of Independence, Gordis measures Israel’s achievements, critiques its failures, and acknowledges its inherent contradictions in this compelling work of Jewish history―ultimately suggesting that, though it has often fallen short, the Jewish state is a success far beyond anything its founders could have imagined.

This unflinching and clear-eyed book provides a vital framework for understanding the Jewish state today:

• A Founding Document Under Scrutiny: How Israel’s Declaration of Independence serves as an unflinching metric for its successes and failures seventy-five years later.
• A Nation at a Crossroads: An essential analysis of the judicial reform crisis and the October 7th War, and what they reveal about the country’s soul.
• National Liberation and Its Costs: A deep dive into the triumphs and tragedies of the Jewish national liberation movement, from unprecedented success to great suffering.
• Modern Middle East History: A balanced examination of Israel’s inherent contradictions, offering a thoughtful perspective on one of the world’s most complex regions.

Daniel Gordis is the Koret Distinguished Fellow at Shalem College—Israel’s first liberal arts college—which he helped found in 2007. The author of numerous books on Jewish thought and political currents in Israel, he has twice won the National Jewish Book Award, including the prize for Book of the Year for Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn. Raised and educated in the United States, he has been living in Jerusalem since 1998.