http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n19/nathan-thrall/feeling-good-about-feeling-bad
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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