Zionism and Jewish Culture - by Yitzhak Conforti (Hardcover)

About the Book

Zionism and Jewish Culture offers a fresh cultural perspective on Zionism, highlighting the dominant role of pre-modern Jewish culture on the modern Jewish national movement. The book investigates the history, politics and Zionist vision of the pre-state period. These issues are still relevant, thus enabling a deeper understanding of Zionism and Israel today.

Book Synopsis

Zionism and Jewish Culture offers a fresh cultural perspective on Zionism, highlighting the dominant role of pre-modern Jewish culture on the modern Jewish national movement. The book investigates the history, politics and Zionist vision of the pre-state period. These issues are still relevant, thus enabling a deeper understanding of Zionism and Israel today.

Review Quotes

"In the final analysis, Conforti demonstrates that early Zionism, though faced with the absence of territoriality, creatively harnessed the Jewish people's rich religious and cultural traditions to build a cohesive national identity, paving the way for the eventual establishment of the sovereign state of Israel."

- Neville Teller, The Jerusalem Post

"Yitzhak Conforti's Zionism and Jewish Culture: A Study in the Origins of a National Movement is a pathbreaking, deeply penetrating study that is certain to enrich the scholarly landscape and possibly even change a popular discourse enthralled by hashtags rather than analysis.

Having brought about the establishment of a state, Zionism may have seemed like a radically new Jewish development in 1948. But as Yitzhak Conforti shows, by deploying a much older and more primal mode of Jewish storytelling built around the Hebrew language and the classical canon, Zionism sustained itself without political achievements for decades.

Long before transformations in global politics offered an opportunity for a Jewish state, some Zionists were moving the language and literature of the Jews a long way from its rabbinic precincts. Rather than retread the question of why Zionists eventually fought for sovereignty, Conforti's book is a highly original exploration of what sovereignty meant for Zionism."

--Donna Robinson Divine, Morningstar Family Professor of Jewish studies and professor of government, emerita, Smith College

"Yitzhak Conforti presents an innovative approach to the study of Zionism by offering a thought-provoking cultural paradigm as an alternative to the existing primordial and modernist approaches. Through a series of case studies, Conforti illuminates the unmistakable link between Zionism and the Jewish past, and demonstrates the impact of culture on Zionist politics and vision. Conforti convincingly presents the correlation between the Zionist vision for the future and ancient Jewish heritage and the Bible, as well as the intricate relationship between the Jewish people and the land of Israel. Meticulous and systematic, Zionism and Jewish Culture: A Study in the Origins of a National Movement reveals the cultural dimension of Zionism, without which it is impossible to explain the success of the Jewish national movement in establishing a modern nation-state. The book will serve as a point of reference in any future discussion of the intellectual history of Zionism."

--Professor Aviva Halamish, The Open University of Israel

"At a time of profound ignorance about Zionism and its origins, Yitzhak Conforti's latest contribution illuminates the interplay between Zionism and Jewish Culture. The author utilises his expertise to elucidate many fundamental questions. It is an important work for the genuinely perplexed and quizzical."

--Colin Shindler, Emeritus Professor, SOAS, University of London

"Conforti offers a persuasive and thought-provoking reconstruction of the cultural dimensions of Zionism. The book illustrates why understanding this modern movement is incomplete without considering the historical past of the premodern national community ... a timely revision of the modernist claim that Zionism has invented a nation and crafted an 'imagined community'"

About the Author

Yitzhak Conforti is Associate Professor in the Koschitzky Department of Jewish History at Bar Ilan University. He is the author of: Past Tense - Zionist Historiography and the Shaping of the Zionist Memory (2006) and Shaping A Nation - The Cultural Origins of Zionism, 1882-1948 (2019). He was a research fellow in the Katz Center at U-Penn, a visiting scholar at NYU and the CJH, New York, and a visiting research scholar at the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University. He has published extensively on modern Jewish historiography, Zionist history and culture, Jewish nationalism and Zionism.