Israel is Real: An Obssessive Quest to Understand the Jewish Nation and Its History [Hardcover]

Rich Cohen (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0374177783 | ISBN-13: 978-0374177782 | Publication Date: July 21, 2009 | Edition: First Edition

“It’s a great irony that Israel was more secure as an idea than it’s ever been as a nation with an army.”

 

In AD 70, when the Second Temple was destroyed, a handful of visionaries saved Judaism by reinventing it—by taking what had been a national religion, identified with a particular place, and turning it into an idea. Jews no longer needed Jerusalem to be Jews. Whenever a Jew studied—wherever he was—he would be in the holy city. In this way, a few rabbis turned a real city into a city of the mind; in this way, they turned the Temple into a book and preserved their faith. Though you can burn a city, you cannot sack an idea or kill a book. But in our own time, Zionists have turned the book back into a

temple. And unlike an idea, a temple can be destroyed. The creation of Israel has made Jews vulnerable in a way they have not been for two thousand years.

 

In Israel Is Real, Rich Cohen’s superb new history of the Zionist idea and the Jewish state—the history of a nation chronicled as if it were the biography of a person—he brings to life dozens of fascinating figures, each driven by the same impulse: to reach Jerusalem. From false messiahs such as David Alroy (Cohen calls him the first superhero, with his tallis as a cape) and Sabbatai Zevi, who led thousands on a mad spiritual journey, to the early Zionists (many of them failed journalists), to the iconic figures of modern Jewish Sparta, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, and Ariel Sharon, Cohen shows how all these lives together form a single story, a single life. In this unique book, Cohen examines the myth of the wandering Jew, the paradox of Jewish power (how can you be both holy and nuclear?), and the triumph and tragedy of the Jewish state—how the creation of modern Israel has changed what it means to be a Jew anywhere.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Reading the Bible and Jewish history both literally and symbolically, this eclectic and passionate, wide-ranging history of Israel and Zionism by the author of Tough Jews decodes the story of Jonah in the whale's belly as the Diaspora Jew in Nazi concentration camps. Cohen catalogues the accomplishments of first-century Jewish scholar Jonathan ben Zakkai in the way Willie Dixon catalogues a man's deeds in a blues song, and summons Kierkegaard and Allen Ginsberg as he muses about Abraham, a crazy old man willing to murder his son to earn God's blessing: Everything in Judaism is a repetition of this scene, Cohen asserts. Of Herzl, he says it was his career writing whimsical newspaper essays that made his mind fluid and open to the vision of Zionism. He sees Ariel Sharon as a tragic Shakespearean character who was driven to dismantle the settlements in Gaza out of a great love for Israel. Finally, Cohen does not believe that the Holocaust justifies the state of Israel—or that Israel needs to be justified. Cohen's idiosyncratic yet often lyrical take on Israel is sometimes exasperating but always deeply felt and refreshing. (Aug.)
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Review

Praise for Israel Is Real

“[Israel Is Real] accomplishes the miraculous. It made a subject that has vexed me since early childhood into a riveting story . . . by narrating the oft-told saga of the Jews in a fresh and engaging fashion. Provocative and entertaining … Cohen brings tough love to Judaism and modern Israel.”—Tony Horowitz, The New York Times Book Review 

“A sweeping and impressionistic saga . . . [which] also happens to be a page-turning delight to read. What other book about Zionist history has ever included references to “Howl,” “Goodfellas,” Joseph Mitchell, and Willie Dixon? I commend and admire this book.” —Samuel G Freedman, Chicago Tribune

“Cohen is a masterful and slyly provocative writer who marches boldly into the most controversial issues posed by the existence of Israel. Blending historical narrative with contemporary reportage, Israel Is Real makes an argument that cannot be ignored. Along the way, Cohen establishes himself as being among the most talented essayists of his generation.”—Evan Wright, author of Generation Kill

“A fascinating big-picture account of Israel from its distant past to what happened last week. Rich Cohen tells this story central to mankind with skill, passion, common sense, and wit.”—Ian Frazier, author of Great Plains

“Rich Cohen’s passionate, engaged, thoroughly modern book is—dare I say—a revelation.”—Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

“The best book I’ve ever read about Israel (that troubled state), and the last word on it: all the stories, all the figures, all the fires, all the battles, all the exiles, all the personalities, all the strikes, and all the gutters. Rich Cohen has delivered the full big thing, a monumental book, the best I’ve read and expect to read for a long time. As the priests in the old city would say, it has hava: it’s full of life.”—David Lipsky, author of Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point

“Nobody has yet written about our Middle East heartbreak with such range and lucidity. Rich Cohen has kept an account of the wanderings; he’s kept a record of the tears. Israel Is Real is the definitive book on Israel.”—Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng

“Rich Cohen’s book creates a vibrant portrait that offers reasons Israel—surrounded by those who want to exterminate it—deserves to survive.”—Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (July 21, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374177783
• ISBN-13: 978-0374177782
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #711,387 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Modern and Incredibly American Story About Israel, July 30, 2009

By 

Rob Gordon "Book and Vinyl Lover" (London, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Israel is Real: An Obssessive Quest to Understand the Jewish Nation and Its History (Hardcover)

...and the best book I've read about that country: smart, funny, brilliant, incredibly alive. I picked this book up on a Saturday and finished it on Tuesday, after racing across 2000 years of history, desert, and some of the most unbelievable characters and settings I've ever encountered in a book. The even weirder thing is that they're all real. The false messiahs of the 1600s. The New Orleans Fruit Salesman who topples South American governments and helps the UN vote in the state of Israel. The turncoat Josephus who survives the destructioin of Israel (Israel gets destroyed like five times in the book; if it was a movie, it'd have a mongo special effects budget) and so lives to give the rest of us the story. The tank commander who helps single-handedly win a war. It's not just that I understand a topic I couldn't quite see my way through before, because any decent book will do that. This book is a thrilling story, a wake-you-up story, a modern story. It's a story I felt I was listening to, in a crowded room, with a breathless teller. I've read other Cohen books, so I came to this one as a fan. This book is the reason you become one. It's like opening a door and having a whole world blast out at you. I've never read a book, a true book (in both senses) like it.

33 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Look Elsewhere, January 7, 2010

By 

Maxine (Williamsville,, New York United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Israel is Real: An Obssessive Quest to Understand the Jewish Nation and Its History (Hardcover)

If you want a sound, balanced,history of Zionism and the state of Israel, look elsewhere. In this book Rich Cohen writes as an essayist, not a historian. He takes the reader on a highly selective whirlwind tour through three thousand years of Jewish history, a tour that emphasizes individuals and events that help him make his point. His point is that the Jewish people would be better off without a state because a state has brought them out of the realm of moral universalism into the realm of immoral power politics. This kind of personal judgment belongs in an op-ed piece, not a serious history.
The book is colorfully written, with lively sketches of false messiahs and other obscure (to most readers) figures from the Jewish past. But considering the importance of the topic, colorful writing is not enough. For example, the author tells us that Sharon "reeked of sadness" when ordering the evacuation of Gaza. "It was the sadness of the father who watches the sky turn purple and shivers as the wind falls still." Eloquent--but what does it mean? Footnotes cite few sources and are often so incomplete as to be useless. The bibliography includes "The Merchant of Venice," but not Howard Sachar's authoritative "A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Times"
As a professor who has taught history of Zionism and Israel at the university level, I found many inaccurate and misleading statements. For example, the author contrasts the Hellenized Jews of the first century BCE with "those who followed the ascetic faith of the desert." But by that time the "religion of the desert" (ascetic or otherwise) was already being replaced by Rabbinic, or synagogue, Judaism. The author argues that after being exiled from their land by Rome, "the Jews left history." Is he unaware of the literary and philosophical achievements of medieval Jews, their role in transmitting kmowledge from the more advanced Arabic world to the less advanced Christian world, and, later, their role in European nation building?
Cohen's account of the creation of Israel is equally flawed. He passes over in silence the hard political, economic, and educational work done by Jews in Palestine between the two wars, work that created the institutional structure of the state long before the Holocaust and the UN resolution of 1947. As a result, his book reinforces the widespread but mistaken idea that European countries "gave" the Jews a state to compensate for the Holocaust. Cohen emphasizes violence perpetrated by Israelis, but downplays violence directed at Israel. While he does not exactly say that Israel will disappear, his apocalyptic tone implies as much. He says, for example, that the story of Jerusalem is not complete unless Jerusalem gets destroyed. He compares the state of Israel to the third Temple. The title of the final chapter, where he speculates about Israel's future, is "the Ninth of Av," the Jewish day of mourning for the destruction of the first two temples.
In sum, "Israel is Real" is colorful and glib, but untrustworthy. If you are seriously interested in Jewish and Israeli history, look elsewhere.

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Story Well Told, July 29, 2009

By 

J. Donson "Julian" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Israel is Real: An Obssessive Quest to Understand the Jewish Nation and Its History (Hardcover)

This is not a book for Jews. Or rather, this is not a book only for Jews. It is simply a wonderful book. Cohen tells the history of Judaism not as a scholarly chronology but as a simple story, with a beginning (the destruction of the Second Temple), a middle (the two millennia during which Judaism existed only as an idea, without a land), and an end (the Zionist movement and the creation of Israel). He gives dimension to the characters you know--your Theodore Herzls, your Moshe Dayans--and focuses on ones you may not, like Sam the Banana Man, who each carry the whole story within them. A huge part of the appeal is Cohen's prose, propelled by biblical rhythms (Ariel Sharon "sinned as David sinned. He sinned as Abraham sinned") and playful associations (comparing the West Bank settlers, for example, to Travis Bickle, Mickey Mouse, and Malcom X in the same paragraph). Wow.