I have been devouring news of the conflict in Gaza, but feel unqualified to lead a discussion about it. I do, however, want to recommend Ari Shavits book, My Promised Land; The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, which won a 2014 Anisfield-Wolf award. I learned a great deal from reading this book, as the author brings an unsparing eye to the land he loves. Leon Wieseltiers review for the New York Times: It is one of the achievements of Ari Shavit’s important and powerful book to recover the feeling of Israel’s facticity and to revel in it, to restore the grandeur of the simple fact in full view of the complicated facts. My Promised Land startles in many ways, not least in its relative lack of interest in providing its readers with a handy politics. Shavit, a columnist who serves on the editorial board of Haaretz, has an undoctrinaire mind. He comes not to praise or to blame, though along the way he does both, with erudition and with eloquence; he comes instead to observe and to reflect. This is the least tendentious book about Israel I have ever read. It is a Zionist book unblinkered by Zionism. It is about the entirety of the Israeli experience. Shavit is immersed in all of the history of his country. While some of it offends him, none of it is alien to him. His extraordinary chapter on the charismatic and corrupt Aryeh Deri, and the rise of Sephardic religious politics in Israel, richly illustrates the reach of his understanding.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 12:29:11 +0000
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