In 1959, the American rabbi and historian Arthur Hertzberg published The Zionist Idea, an anthology of major essays in Zionist thought spanning an era from before Theodor Herzl through the founding of the state of Israel. The book has been an invaluable resource for students and teachers for decades, but it is not without its flaws. In welcoming Gil Troy’s The Zionist Ideas (plural), meant to be a revised and updated version of Hertzberg’s work, Allan Arkush finds it has its own virtues and drawbacks:
Troy’s volume, like Hertzberg’s, has many merits. But . . . Hertzberg’s elegant and penetrating introduction to The Zionist Idea is one of the best essays on Zionist thought ever published. Troy, while acknowledging that it is “majestic,” has replaced it with a rather pedestrian mise-en-scène of the Zionist movement, one that celebrates more than it analyzes and one that leaves out much that is crucial. And he makes a lot of mistakes. For [one] instance, Moses Mendelssohn never uttered the words Troy directly attributes to him: “Be a cosmopolitan man in the street and a Jew at home.” When the 19th-century Russian Jewish poet Y.L. Gordon wrote something similar, he was not, as Troy maintains, echoing Mendelssohn but at most channeling him. . . .
Troy remedies . . . at least some of what [Hertzberg] leaves out about Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionism. Instead of displaying only the spokesman for a Jewish state as he appeared before the Peel Commission in 1937, he allows his readers a glimpse of the militancy that no doubt discomfited Hertzberg, including Jabotinsky’s 1923 call for an “iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight.”
Another virtue of the first part of The Zionist Ideas is its inclusion of pre-1948 voices absent from The Zionist Idea, among them a few women. (Hertzberg’s volume was all male.) . . . Having reduced Hertzberg’s more than 500 pages of documents predating Israel’s independence to 138, Troy has [also made] plenty of room for a large gallery of more recent Zionist thinkers and activists of all stripes, from the diaspora as well as Israel. Overall, his choices are good. . . .
The problem is that Troy has squeezed over a hundred of them into fewer than 500 pages. You can’t get very far into the complex arguments and ideas of Bernard Avishai, Chaim Gans, Ruth Gavison, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Ze’ev Maghen, Simon Rawidowicz, Yael Tamir, or Ruth Wisse by reading a page (or three) of their work. In fact, at this soundbite length these very different thinkers tend to merge into each other, forming a vague, illusory consensus.
In the same essay, Arkush also reviews Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor by Yossi Klein Halevi, one of the contemporary thinkers excerpted by Troy:
Halevi’s new book is not so much an appeal from a Zionist to anti-Zionists as a call from a religious Jew to religious Muslims to accept the existence of a Jewish state on the grounds of a common faith in a beneficent God and humanity. Explicitly taking exception to the broader agenda of many faithful Jews, who see no room for compromise over the Land of Israel, Halevi hopes that his scaled-down, peaceable vision of coexistence in the Holy Land will find a ready hearing—or some hearing, anyhow—among the people whose calls to prayer regularly echo across West Bank neighborhoods to his own house on the outmost edge of Jewish Jerusalem.
Of the well-known obstacles that Islam places in the way of recognition of the legitimacy of any kind of Jewish state Halevi says nothing. He does, however, provide us with several examples of broad-minded Palestinians with whom he has interacted in the past, and he clearly hopes that there are more such people just over the horizon. . . . Will Yossi Klein Halevi’s book turn out merely to represent the hopes of a 21st-century liberal religious Zionist, or is it, rather, an early document of a new theological-political opportunity?
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/3439/zionisms-old-and-new/