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"Israel: A History" makes top 40 Jewish books of 2012 in Jewish Ideas Daily.
See H-Judaic review of Orit Rozin's The Rise of the Individual in 1950s Israel.
Boaz Neumann's Land and Desire in Early Zionism has received the Azrieli Institute Award for Best Book in Israel Studies, 2012.
Forthcoming Books
The Zionist Paradox: Hebrew Literature and Israeli Identity
Yigal Schwartz
Contemporary Israelis suffer from a strange disorder. Despite the obvious successes of the Zionist enterprise and the State of Israel, tension persists, with a collective sense that something is wrong and should be better.
This cognitive dissonance arises from the disjunction between "place" (defined as what Israel is really like) and "Place" (defined as the imaginary community comprised of history, myth, and dream).
Through the lens of five major works in Hebrew by Hebrew writers Abraham Mapu (1853), Theodore Herzl (1902), Yosef Luidor (1912), Moshe Shamir (1948) and Amos Oz (1963), Schwartz unearths the core of this paradox as it evolves over 100 years, from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s.
Yigal Schwartz is professor of Hebrew Literature and director of the Heksherim Research Institute for Jewish and Israeli Literature and Culture at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz: History, Memory, and the Politics of Survival
Tuvia Friling
Eliezer Grynbaum (1908-1948) was a Polish Jew denounced for serving as a Kapo while interned at Auschwitz. He was the communist son of Itzhak Grynbaum, the most prominent secular leader of interwar Polish Jewry, who later became the chairman of the Jewish Agency’s Rescue Committee during the Holocaust, and Israel’s first Minister of the Interior. The denunciation of the son, in light of the father’s high placement in both Polish and Israeli politics and his suspicious death during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, adds intrigue to a controversy that really centers on the question of what constitutes – and how do we evaluate - moral behavior in Auschwitz.
Grynbaum - a Jewish Kapo, a communist, an anti-Zionist, a secularist, and the son of a polarizing Zionist leader - became a symbol exploited by opponents of the movements to which he was linked. Sorting through this “Rashomon”-like story within the cultural and political contexts in which he operated, Friling illuminates key debates that rent the Jewish community in Europe and Israel from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Tuvia Friling is professor of modern Jewish history at the Ben-Gurion Research Institute, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.