The New Republic

Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England By Anthony Julius (Oxford University Press, 811 pp., $45) I. READ MORE >>

Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England By Anthony Julius (Oxford University Press, 811 pp., $45) I. READ MORE >>

For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus By Frederick Brown (Knopf, 304 pp., $28.95) READ MORE >>

For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus By Frederick Brown (Knopf, 304 pp., $28.95) READ MORE >>

The pun in the title of Israel Is Real, the new book by Rich Cohen, is silly but not meaningless. The problem of reality, and how to distinguish it from fantasy, fear, and hope, has been with the Zionist project since the very beginning. The slogan "If you will it, it is not a dream," coined by Theodor Herzl in his novel Altneuland, was a way of acknowledging the sheer fantasy of the Zionist idea--to recreate a Jewish state that had not existed for 2,000 years. READ MORE >>

As Theodor Herzl actually prophesied, it would take half a century for the Jewish state to be created. Toward the end of that period, the people for whose very lives it was being formed lost one-third of its number to Nazism, an organic expression from the history of Western civilization. But to the Zionists belonged the credit for grasping that Europe--liberal, enlightened, increasingly bourgeois--was doomed territory for the Jews. READ MORE >>

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