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Thursday, October 2, 2014

Feeling Good about Feeling Bad

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n19/nathan-thrall/feeling-good-about-feeling-badLondon Review of Books

Feeling Good about Feeling Bad

Nathan Thrall

  • My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit
    Scribe, 447 pp, £20.00, February, ISBN 978 1 922247 54 4
Ari Shavit is a Haaretz columnist admired by liberal Zionists in America, where his book has been the focus of much attention. In April 1897 his great-grandfather Herbert Bentwich sailed for Jaffa, leading a delegation of 21 Zionists who were investigating whether Palestine would make a suitable site for a Jewish national home. Theodor Herzl, whose pamphlet The Jewish State had been published the year before, had never been to Palestine and hoped Bentwich’s group would produce a comprehensive report of its visit for the First Zionist Congress which was to be held in Basel in August that year. Bentwich was well-to-do, Western European and religious. Herzl and most early Zionists were chiefly interested in helping the impoverished and persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe, but Bentwich was more worried about the number of secular and emancipated Jews in Western Europe who were becoming assimilated. A solution to the problems of both groups, he believed, could be found by resurrecting the Land of Israel in Palestine.http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n19/nathan-thrall/feeling-good-about-feeling-bad

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