Basic Books
The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State
Key Metrics
- Shlomo Avineri
- Basic Books
- Paperback
- 9780465094790
- 8.2 X 5.4 X 0.9 inches
- 0.55 pounds
- History > Jewish - General
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
For eighteen centuries pious Jews had prayed for the return to Jerusalem, but only in the revolutionary atmosphere of nineteenth-century Europe was this yearning transformed into an active political movement: Zionism. In The Making of Modern Zionism, the distinguished political scientist Shlomo Avineri rejects the common view that Zionism was solely a reaction to anti-Semitism and persecution. Rather, he sees it as part of the universal quest for self-determination. In sharply-etched intellectual profiles of Zionism's major thinkers from Moses Hess to Theodore Herzl and from Vladimir Jabotinsky to David Ben Gurion, Avineri traces the evolution of this quest from its intellectual origins in the early nineteenth century to the establishment of the State of Israel. In an expansive new epilogue, he tracks the changes in Israeli society and politics since 1967 which have strengthened the more radical nationalist and religious trends in Zionism at the expense of its more liberal strains. The result is a book that enables us to understand, as perhaps never before, one of the truly revolutionary ideas of our time.
Author Bio
SHLOMO AVINERI, Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is a graduate of the Hebrew University and the London School of Economics, and served as Director-General of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the first government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
He held visiting appointments at Yale, Cornel, University of California, Cardozo School of Law, Australian National University, Oxford and Northwestern University; and has been a Fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, both in Washington, D.C., the Institute for World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO) in Moscow, and Collegium Budapest.
He is Recurring Visiting Professor at the Central European University in Budapest.
In 1996 he received the Israel Prize, the country's highest civilian decoration.
Among his books: The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, Hegel's Theory of the Modern State, Israel and the Palestinians, Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, The Making of Modern Zionism, Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism, and Communitarianism and Individualism.
His most recent book is an intellectual biography of Theodore Herzl (in Hebrew).
Source: Central European University
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