Practical Zionism in the Mandate era (1920-1948) is usually associated with agricultural settlements (kibbutzim), organized socialist workers, and the creation of a formal high culture. This book fills a gap in historical research by presenting a different type of practical Zionism in Jewish Palestine--urban, middle-class, and created by popular and informal daily practices. While research on Tel Aviv has so far been confined to "positivist" historical description or focused nostalgically on local myths, Helman's book reconstructs and analyzes the city's formative decades on various levels,...
Practical Zionism in the Mandate era (1920-1948) is usually associated with agricultural settlements (kibbutzim), organized socialist workers, and the...
The Jordan Rift Valley, stretching from the Red Sea to Lebanon, was ripped open millions of years ago by vast forces within the earth. This geological object has also been a part of human history ever since early humans used it as a path in their journey out of Africa. And for a quarter of a century it has been part of the biography of Israeli writer Haim Watzman. In the autumn of 2004, as his country was riven by a fierce debate over its borders, Watzman took a two-week journey up the valley. Along the way he met scientists who try to understand the rift through the evidence lying on its...
The Jordan Rift Valley, stretching from the Red Sea to Lebanon, was ripped open millions of years ago by vast forces within the earth. This geological...
When American-born Haim Watzman immigrated to Israel, he was drafted into the army and, after eighteen months of compulsory service, was assigned to Company C, the reserve infantry unit that would define the next twenty years of his life. From 1984 until 2002, for at least a month a year, Watzman, who had never aspired to military adventure, was a soldier. Watzman was a soldier as he adjusted to his new country, raised his children, and pursued a career as a writer and translator. At times he defended his adopted country's borders; at other times he patrolled beyond them, or that gray...
When American-born Haim Watzman immigrated to Israel, he was drafted into the army and, after eighteen months of compulsory service, was assigned to C...
Winner of the Azrieli Award for Best Book in Israel Studies In late summer 1929, a countrywide outbreak of Arab-Jewish-British violence transformed the political landscape of Palestine forever. In contrast with those who point to the wars of 1948 and 1967, historian Hillel Cohen marks these bloody events as year zero of the Arab-Israeli conflict that persists today. The murderous violence inflicted on Jews caused a fractious--and now traumatized--community of Zionists, non-Zionists, Ashkenazim, and Mizrachim to coalesce around a unified national consciousness arrayed against an...
Winner of the Azrieli Award for Best Book in Israel Studies In late summer 1929, a countrywide outbreak of Arab-Jewish-British violence tra...
The Purse and the Sword presents a critical analysis of Israel's legal system in the context of its politics, history, and the forces that shape its society. This book examines the extensive powers that Israel's Supreme Court arrogated to itself since the 1980s and traces the history of the transformation of its legal system and the shifts in the balance of power between the branches of government. Centrally, this shift has put unprecedented power in the hands of both the Court and Israel's attorney general and state prosecution at the expense of Israel's cabinet, constituting its...
The Purse and the Sword presents a critical analysis of Israel's legal system in the context of its politics, history, and the forces that sh...
Twenty-four stories of Israeli and Jewish life, chosen from the more than one hundred Haim Watzman has written over the last nine years in his "Necessary Stories" column in the The Jerusalem Report. Bookended by a flashback to his first weekend in Israel forty years ago and a storytelling encounter on a recent flight back home from the US, these stories--funny, meditative, and sad, set in immigrant camps, the army, and the author's own neighborhood in south Jerusalem--uniquely capture what it is like, in our age, to be an Israeli and a Jew.
Praise for Haim Watzman:...
Twenty-four stories of Israeli and Jewish life, chosen from the more than one hundred Haim Watzman has written over the last nine years in his "Nec...
