A very brief book that is sure to raise questions and incite strong reactions.
An Israeli history professor questions the notion of a Jewish identity and the Israeli stance toward their Palestinian neighbors.
In this attempt to “reveal some components of the chain of personal identities I have acquired in the course of my life,” Sand (Modern History/Tel Aviv Univ.; The Invention of the Land of Israel, 2012, etc.) continues his critique of accepted notions of Jewish identity, land and history. While this work is more reflective than previous books, a large portion of this short volume is a reassessment on how we think about Jewish identity. Sand works from the premise that we are living in a time in which political anti-Semitism is no longer a reality. As such, the collective identity as “victim”—a term that the author feels was monopolized in post–World War II popular culture by the Jews—no longer offers merit for the Jewish community. Sand believes that the greater Jewish community is undergoing an identity crisis by way of the concept of “Secular Judaism”; without a religious tradition and law to tie people together, the means through which Jews are part of a shared identity remains ambiguous. From this perspective, a void in Jewish identity is filled with a shared anti-Arab sentiment, and the consequence of this false notion of Jewish identity is the dire treatment of Israel’s Palestinian neighbors. Sand brings up a number of interesting questions (none of which are uniquely his), but he never addresses the ways in which his position as a university professor in Israel colors his view. His insulated experiences of living in Israel and his regular travels through the cosmopolitan sections of Paris, London and New York may not provide insight into the ways in which Jewish individuals and communities outside of his purview continue to demarcate a sense of self in the face of political and societal anti-Semitism.
A very brief book that is sure to raise questions and incite strong reactions.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-78168-614-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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