Jews and Muslims in the Arab World highlights the effects of historical memory on the Arab-Israel conflict, demonstrating that both Jews and Arabs use stories of distant pasts to create their identities and shape their politics. Whether real or imagined, the past filtered through their collective memories has had and will continue to have enormous influence on how Jews and Arabs perceive themselves and each other. Jews and Muslims in the Arab World describes the ways in which the past is a...

This timely book tells the fascinating story of how Zionists colonizers planned and established nearly 700 agricultural settlements, towns, and cities from the 1880s to the present. This extraordinary activity of planners, architects, social scientists, military personnel, politicians, and settlers is inextricably linked to multiple contexts: Jewish and Zionist history, the Arab/Jewish conflict, and the diffusion of European ideas to non-European worlds.S. Ilan Troen demonst...

The struggle over Israel/Palestine is not just another contest by competing nationalisms or an instance of geopolitical competition. It is also about control of sacred territory that involves local Jews, Muslims, and Christians as well as worldwide faith communities, each with their own interests and stake in what transpires.This balanced introduction to a complex subject presents the multiple positions within the great monotheistic traditions. It demonstrates that the secular disc...

"An excellent tool in Middle Eastern politics classes [and] an intellectual resource for experts who want to learn more about the complexities of Israel."— Reading ReligionAmericans debate constantly about Israel, its place in the Middle East, and its relations with the United States. Essential Israel examines a wide variety of complex issues and current concerns in historical and contemporary contexts to provide readers with an intimate sense of t...

Two creative centers of Jewish life rose to prominence in the twentieth century, one in Israel and the other in the United States. Although Israeli and American Jews share kinship and history drawn from their Eastern European roots, they have developed divergent cultures from their common origins, often seeming more like distant cousins than close relatives. This book explores why this is so, examining how two communities that constitute eighty percent of the world’s Jewish population have...

"A learned and engaging collection of essays" on Israel's diverse, modern metropolis, established in 1909 ( Religious Studies Review).Tel-Aviv, the First Century brings together a broad range of scholars and cutting-edge research to trace the development and paradoxes of Tel-Aviv as an urban center and a national symbol. Through the lenses of history, literature, urban planning, gender studies, architecture, art, and other fields, these essays rev...

Upheavals of the modern period have dramatically changed the traditional pattern of the rescue of Jews by Jews. Whereas until the mid-nineteenth century rescue was carried out by community leaders in accordance with the religiously rooted injunction for the redemption of captives, in the modern period largely secular international Jewish organizations and the State of Israel have emerged as the primary instruments of expressing Jewish national solidarity. The campaigns to restore the exodu...