Author: Kenneth D. Wald Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108497896 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
Shows how American Jews developed a liberal political culture that has influenced their political priorities from the founding to today.
Author: Alexander Kaye Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0190922745 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 281
Book Description
"This book is about the attempt of Orthodox Jewish Zionists to implement traditional Jewish law (halakha) as the law of the State of Israel. These religious Zionists began their quest for a halakhic sate immediately after Israel's establishment in 1948 and competed for legal supremacy with the majority of Israeli Jews who wanted Israel to be a secular democracy. Although Israel never became a halachic state, the conflict over legal authority became the backdrop for a pervasive culture war, whose consequences are felt throughout Israeli society until today. The book traces the origins of the legal ideology of religious Zionists and shows how it emerged in the middle of the twentieth century. It further shows that the ideology, far from being endemic to Jewish religious tradition as its proponents claim, is a version of modern European jurisprudence, in which a centralized state asserts total control over the legal hierarchy within its borders. The book shows how the adoption (conscious or not) of modern jurisprudence has shaped religious attitudes to many aspects of Israeli society and politics, created an ongoing antagonism with the state's civil courts, and led to the creation of a new and increasingly powerful state rabbinate. This account is placed into wider conversations about the place of religion in democracies and the fate of secularism in the modern world. It concludes with suggestions about how a better knowledge of the history of religion and law in Israel may help ease tensions between its religious and secular citizens"--
Author: Herbert F. Weisberg Publisher: University of Michigan Press ISBN: 0472131354 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 297
Book Description
Jewish voting is distinctive and paradoxical. Stereotypes about the voting habits of American Jews include that they vote at unusually high levels, that they’re liberal, that they vote for Democratic candidates without regard to their self-interest, and that Israel is their most important issue. Not only are all of those claims wrong, but they obscure aspects of Jews’ voting behavior that are much more interesting. The Politics of American Jews uncovers new perspectives on Jews’ political choices by analyzing the unprecedented amount of survey data that is now available, including surveys that permit contrasting the voting of Jews with that of comparable non-Jews. The data suggest several mysteries about Jewish voting. While more Jews are Democrats than are liberals, there has not been a previous exploration of why more politically conservative Jews are not Republicans. A fresh picture of Jews’ political behaviors shows that Jews are no longer politically monolithic. They vote on the basis of their self-interest and their values, but not all Jews share the same self-interest or the same values. While most Jews have incorporated being Democratic and liberal into their political DNA, growing divisions in their ranks suggest a mutation could occur.
Author: Shlomo Avineri Publisher: ISBN: 9781780224558 Category : Jewish nationalism Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Born in Budapest in 1860, Theodor Herzl was a daydreamer who aspired to follow the footsteps of De Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal. As the Paris correspondent for Neue Freie Presse, Herzl followed the Dreyfus Affair, a notorious anti-Semitic incident in France in which a French Jewish army captain was falsely convicted of spying for Germany. Herzl came to reject his early ideas regarding Jewish emancipation and assimilation, and to believe that the Jews must remove themselves from Europe and create their own state. In 1896, he published 'The Jewish State' to immediate acclaim. This is his story.
Author: Yehouda Shenhav Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 0745662943 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
For over two decades, many liberals in Israel have attempted, with wide international support, to implement the two-state solution: Israel and Palestine, partitioned on the basis of the Green Line - that is, the line drawn by the 1949 Armistice Agreements that defined Israel’s borders until 1967, before Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza following the Six-Day War. By going back to Israel’s pre-1967 borders, many people hope to restore Israel to what they imagine was its pristine, pre-occupation character and to provide a solid basis for a long-term solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this original and controversial essay, Yehouda Shenhav argues that this vision is an illusion that ignores historical realities and offers no long-term solution. It fails to see that the real problem is that a state was created in most of Palestine in 1948 in which Jews are the privileged ethnic group, at the expense of the Palestinians - who also must live under a constant state of emergency. The issue will not be resolved by the two-state solution, which will do little for the millions of Palestinian refugees and will also require the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Jews living across the Green Line. All these obstacles require a bolder rethinking of the issues: the Green Line should be abandoned and a new type of polity created on the complete territory of mandatory Palestine, with a new set of constitutional arrangements that address the rights of both Palestinians and Jews, including the settlers.
Author: David Novak Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 131624122X Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
Why should anyone be a Zionist, a supporter of a Jewish state in the land of Israel? Why should there be a Jewish state in the land of Israel? This book seeks to provide a philosophical answer to these questions. Although a Zionist need not be Jewish, nonetheless this book argues that Zionism is only a coherent political stance when it is intelligently rooted in Judaism, especially in the classical Jewish doctrine of God's election of the people of Israel and the commandment to them to settle the land of Israel. The religious Zionism advocated here is contrasted with secular versions of Zionism that take Zionism to be a replacement of Judaism. It is also contrasted with versions of religious Zionism that ascribe messianic significance to the State of Israel, or which see the main task of religious Zionism to be the establishment of an Israeli theocracy.
Author: Zvi Y. Gitelman Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1315486520 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 192
Book Description
This exploration of the Jewish political tradition elucidates a long, rich, and diverse experience of both sovereignty and dispersed statelessness. It holds insights, as Zvi Gitelman points out in his introductory chapter, for anyone interested comparative and ethnic politics, Jewish history, and the prehistory of contemporary Israeli politics. Stuart Cohen analyzes the "covenant idea" and the constitutional character of ancient Israel, which had a profound influence on Western political thought through the medium of the Bible. Gerald Blidstein examines rabbinic strategies for accommodation to the realities of Jewish dispersion in the middle Ages, while Robert Chazan focuses on communal authority and self-governance in the same period. Jonathan Frankel and Paula Hyman move the study into modern times with attempts to characterize the diverse patterns of Jewish political culture and activity in different parts of Europe, in the process revealing the dynamics of political cultural influence. Finally, Peter Medding looks at the "new politics" of contemporary American Jews - as voters, as public officials, and as organizational actors.
Author: Dan Horowitz Publisher: State University of New York Press ISBN: 1438407084 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 372
Book Description
This book provides a thorough and detailed examination of Israeli institutions and how they function. It explains the decline in effectiveness of the government and the spread of cultural malaise in the Israel of the eighties. Horowitz and Lissak trace the integrative and disintegrative trends in Israel and show how a society that had laid the foundations for a cohesive Jewish nation-state became increasingly vulnerable to centrifugal forces. The book not only reflects a broad and comprehensive approach, but also focuses on themes that cut across institutional structures, such as the weakening of social and political cohesion in an overburdened polity.
Author: Kenneth D. Wald
Author: Alexander Kaye
Author: Herbert F. Weisberg
Author: Shlomo Avineri
Author: Yehouda Shenhav
Author: Joseph Isaac Lifshitz
Author: David Novak
Author: Yaacov Yadgar
Author: Zvi Y. Gitelman
Author: Dan Horowitz