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Israel Is Real: An Obsessive Quest To Understand The Jewish Nation And Its History (2009)

by Rich Cohen(Favorite Author)

3.77 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0374177783 (ISBN13: 9780374177782)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

review 1: While there are many more complete and precise books on the history of Israel, I doubt any of them is so much fun to read. I would imagine the breezy (and sometimes glib) prose and the metaphors relating people and places to movie characters and sets grates on the purists, but for those who want to know how things got the way they are, it gives a good outline. The general reader should come away understanding of main events in the history of Israel.The book is written from a Jewish perspective but probably not a mainstream one. Cohen uses the first person plural in referring to the Jewish people (i.e. Now that "we" have a country, "we" can cheer for a soccer team.) Cohen relates historical personages (accents, appearances and attitudes) to people in his family. More defini... moretively, his love for Israel comes through when he writes about the impact of the past and the magnetic pull of the country.Cohen coins phrases, such as "Jerusalem syndrome" and the "new Jew" to describe what he feels are common emotional responses to Israel and its history. Metaphors surrounding David, "the book" and the Second/Third Temple abound.There is a lot of great human interest material on the famous such as Theodore Herzl and Moshe Dayan and the not so famous such as Samuel Zemurray, and Moshe Levinger. The notorious such as Yitzhak Rabin's assassin, Yigal Amir, are described in an engaging way too.If you are knowledgeable about Israel this will probably not suit you. If you are a Zionist, it may make you angry. If you have a bit of knowledge about Israel, you will find many books to help you that are more complete. The benefit of this one is that it will hold your attention.
review 2: I guess you could call this a history book, since it is a loosely chronological account full of actual history, but it doesn't quite fit that mold. It's hard for me to describe, but I will say it raised a lot of interesting questions and taught me a lot about Jewish history. Cohen manages to take a very unwieldy topic and do about as good a job as one can do condensing it into so few pages. If you're trying to make some sense of Israel, this is a good place to start. less

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