Book Reviews

Dieses Buch, das einen fundierten Fundus an Informationen zum Gesamtkomplex „Nahostkoflikt“ von 1916 bis heute bietet, sollte eine Pflichtlektüre für jeden sein, der sich mit dem Nahen Osten und der Geschichte Israels befasst. Das Zitat von Abba Eban, dem ersten…

Anti-Zionism is thus anti-Semitism’s moral salvation, its perfect disguise, its route to legitimation,” writes Cary Nelson in Israel Denial, a book about the faculty campaign against the Jewish state. In a year that’s been rife with an old hatred rearing its…

Fiercely anti-Zionist students have become a fixture on American college campuses. They depend on professors for their doctrine, and the professors are spreading disinformation, as Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) between 2006 and 2012, shows in…

Jonathan Neumann’s new book To Heal the World?: How the Jewish Left Corrupts Judaism and Endangers Israel is a scathing analysis of the pseudo-religion of “tikkun olam” — the idea of “repairing,” “fixing,” or “healing” the world. Its unifying thesis is that the concept has…

Hope is not a noun regional analysts of the Red-Sea-Rim associate with Somalia. Regardless of their optic — political, security, cultural, economic — most analysts offer,  following the Africanist school of Martin Meredith, grim reasons for the country’s despair, the grimmest…

Ben-Dror Yemini has devoted a lot of his time as a journalist, first for Maariv and now for Yedioth Ahronoth, to refuting what he regards as false allegations against the Jewish state made by NGOs, academics, and the media. In 2014 he summed up…

The demonization and delegitimization of Israel and bigotry directed toward Jewish faculty, staff, and students is increasing at dramatic rates on university and college campuses. In these supposedly intellectual spaces, virulently anti-Israel “scholars” and student-activists connected to, and supportive of, the global…

The secret-history genre confronts the responsible reviewer with writer’s-block-inducing problems of interpretation and evaluation. Rise and Kill First is no exception. Without access to the classified documents and cloak & dagger sources upon which most of Bergman’s hush-hush history is…

In his latest book, A Half Century of Occupation, Gershon Shafir addresses the issue of why the path towards an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord remains blocked. He offers the hypothesis that it is the “colonization” of the “occupied Palestinian territories” (OPT)…