In this fascinating history of the genesis of the backlash against Jewish liberalism, Staub recounts the history American Jews who advocated Palestinian statehood, showing how ideology has split the Jewish community.

When Jewish neoconservatives burst upon the political scene, many people were surprised. Conventional wisdom held that Jews were uniformly liberal. This book explodes the myth of a monolithic liberal Judaism. Michael Staub tells the story of the many fierce battles that raged in postwar America over what the authentically Jewish position ought to be on issues ranging from desegregation to Zionism, from Vietnam to gender relations, sexuality, and family life. Throughout the three decades after 1945, Michael Staub shows, American Jews debated the ways in which the political commitments of Jewish individuals and groups could or should be shaped by their Jewishness. Staub shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the liberal position was never the obvious winner in the contest. By the late 1960s left-wing Jews were often accused by their conservative counterparts of self-hatred or of being inadequately or improperly Jewish. They, in turn, insisted that right-wing Jews were deaf to the moral imperatives of both the Jewish prophetic tradition and Jewish historical experience, which obliged Jews to pursue social justice for the oppressed and the marginalized. Such declamations characterized disputes over a variety of topics: American anticommunism, activism on behalf of African American civil rights, imperatives of Jewish survival, Israel and Israeli-Palestinian relations, the 1960s counterculture, including the women's and gay and lesbian liberation movements, and the renaissance of Jewish ethnic pride and religious observance. Spanning these controversies, Staub presents not only a revelatory and clear-eyed prehistory of contemporary Jewish neoconservatism but also an important corrective to investigations of "identity politics" that have focused on interethnic contacts and conflicts while neglecting intraethnic ones. Revising standard assumptions about the timing of Holocaust awareness in postwar America, Staub charts how central arguments over the Holocaust's purported lessons were to intra-Jewish political conflict already in the first two decades after World War II. Revisiting forgotten artifacts of the postwar years, such as Jewish marriage manuals, satiric radical Zionist cartoons, and the 1970s sitcom about an intermarried couple entitled Bridget Loves Bernie, and incidents such as the firing of a Columbia University rabbi for supporting anti-Vietnam war protesters and the efforts of the Miami Beach Hotel Owners Association to cancel an African Methodist Episcopal Church convention, Torn at the Roots sheds new light on an era we thought we knew well.

By a social worker with special reference to her experience with women refugees from India and Pakistan during the time of partition of India in 1947.

Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, a clinical psychiatrist, exposes the devastating outcome of decades of urban renewal projects to our nation’s marginalized communities. Examining the traumatic stress of “root shock” in three African American communities and similar widespread damage in other cities, she makes an impassioned and powerful argument against the continued invasive and unjust development practices of displacing poor neighborhoods.

When fast-breaking political events forced British novelist Jacobson (Peeping Tom) to put off a trip to Lithuania planned as a search for his Jewish roots, he accepted an offer from the BBC to visit Jewish communities around the globe instead. This informed and witty account of his experiences deals with the wide variety of contemporary Jewish life, as well as with how Jacobson's observations affected his own concept of what it means to be a Jew. Riding an emotional roller coaster, he witnessed the hostility between Jews and African Americans in New York City, attended services in a gay synagogue in California and found his basic cynicism about religion reinforced after he spent time with Orthodox Jews in Israel, although his spirits were lifted by a visit to an idealistic, tolerant Israeli kibbutz. His journey concluded with the postponed trip to Lithuania, where the author found virulent anti-Semitism.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “A deeply reported, deeply personal history of Zionism and Israel that does something few books even attempt: It balances the strength and weakness, the idealism and the brutality, the hope and the horror, that has always been at Zionism’s heart.”—Ezra Klein, The New York Times Winner of the Natan Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Ari Shavit’s riveting work, now updated with new material, draws on historical documents, interviews, and private diaries and letters, as well as his own family’s story, to create a narrative larger than the sum of its parts: both personal and of profound historical dimension. As he examines the complexities and contradictions of the Israeli condition, Shavit asks difficult but important questions: Why did Israel come to be? How did it come to be? Can it survive? Culminating with an analysis of the issues and threats that Israel is facing, My Promised Land uses the defining events of the past to shed new light on the present. Shavit’s analysis of Israeli history provides a landmark portrait of a small, vibrant country living on the edge, whose identity and presence play a crucial role in today’s global political landscape.

The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons imagines a human mission to Mars, a consequence of Earth's devastation from climate change and natural disaster. As humans begin to colonize the planet, history inevitably repeats itself. Dystopian and ecopoetic, this collection of poetry examines the impulse and danger of the colonial mindset, and the ways that gendered violence and ecological destruction, body and land, are linked. "This time we'll form more carefully," one voice hopes in "Ecopoiesis: The Terraforming." "We've started on empty / plains. We'll vaccinate. We'll make the new deal fair." But the new planet becomes a canvas on which the trespasses of the American Frontier are rehearsed and remade. Featuring a multiplicity of narratives and voices, this book presents the reader with sonnet crowns, application forms, and large-scale landscape poems that seem to float across the field of the page. With these unusual forms, Rogers also reminds us of previous exploitations on our own planet: industrial pollution in rural China, Marco Polo's racist accounts of the Batak people in Indonesia, and natural disasters that result in displaced refugees. Striking, thought-provoking, and necessary, The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons offers a new parable for our modern times.