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Feb 25, 2014 02:05 am | Bernard Wasserstein
John B. Judis, Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 448 pp., $30.00.
THE SECURITY outside my neighborhood temple in Hyde Park, Chicago, like that around many Jewish institutions throughout the world these days, is conspicuous, though not as rigorous as at comparable buildings in Germany, France or Sweden. But in this case there is a special reason: Temple KAM Isaiah Israel stands just across the road from the residence of the Obama family. The house is rarely occupied now, but when the Obamas lived there full-time they used to “pal around” (to use Sarah Palin’s felicitous expression) with the congregation’s notoriously radical rabbi, the late Arnold Wolf.
In Genesis, John B. Judis credits Wolf with providing the future president with “his view of Israel.” The rabbi, he says, described himself as a “religious radical” and a “liberal activist.” As Judis writes, he “supported Israel’s existence, but he wanted the Israelis to pursue policies that fully recognized the rights of the Palestinians.” Wolf’s view of Israel represented “a return to the universalism of nineteenth-century Reform Judaism.” In a confessional passage at the outset of his book, Judis, a senior editor at the New Republic and the author of several well-regarded books on domestic and foreign policy, declares his own attraction to Wolf’s teaching “that the role of Jews was not to favor Jews at the expense of other people but to bring the light of ethical prophecy to bear upon the welfare of all peoples.”
read morehttp://nationalinterest.org/bookreview/revisiting-zionism-9940
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