Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

These are but a few of the most central figures.

Building Tel Aviv Gymnasium (high school).

The renewed search for meaning also stemmed from Israelis’ realization that peace was not going to come any time soon. After the devastation of the Yom Kippur War and the collapse of the conceptzia, Yehoram Gaon—one of Israel’s most popular singers—came out with a song the refrain of which was “I promise you, my little girl, that this will be the l

Barbara Tuchman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and historian, once observed that of all the peoples of the world from three thousand years ago, it is only the Jews who live in the same place, speak the same language, and practice the same religion.

OF MORE IMMEDIATE CONCERN to Israel’s government was the spread of nuclear technology, and particularly the nuclear aspirations of governments committed to Israel’s destruction. The Begin doctrine was tested in 2007 when Israel acquired incontrovertible evidence that Syria was building a nuclear reactor near the Euphrates River. After bringing Pres

Israelis of Russian background typically share the right-leaning political dispositions of the Mizrachim—but not their instinctive allegiance to religious tradition. Tel Aviv remains a highly secular city, so different from much of Israel that it is sometimes called “the State of Tel Aviv.” There is no one Israel, but many Israels—and religion play

Successive governments were no less successful at containing this small but ugly phenomenon than they were at limiting the power of the Haredi community. In ways that no preeminent Zionist thinker had foreseen, the Jewish return to physical power had spawned an ugly, racist, and dangerous offshoot; and no matter how small it was, Israel would have

EVEN AS SOME ISRAELIS were growing more interested in their religious roots, much of Israeli society was at the very same time worried about other religious phenomena in the Jewish state. The chief rabbinate, an institution that the Ottomans and British had established and shaped, was becoming ever more reviled. As the Haredim had become increasing

Yet Herzl’s vision of a sovereign state had meaning, increasing numbers of Israelis believed, only if those new Jews rooted themselves and their humanity in the tradition they had inherited. Herzl without Ahad Ha’am was merely political sovereignty—and that, Israelis began to sense, was simply not enough. Theodor Herzl. Ahad Ha’am. Two radically di