THE IDEA OF THE JEWISH STATE

The Idea of the Jewish State by Ben Halpern examined how the idea of the Jewish state had evolved from both Zionism’s struggles with the currents of global politics in nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe and from Jewish divisions over how to proceed as the world they all knew was ending. The book, argues Robinson Divine, reads ‘less like a dispatch from another century than a mirror of the landscape inhabited today.‘ She notes how the current rekindling of the Diaspora as the site for a Jewish identity, to be forged in a tolerance and justice presumed to be unavailable in a Jewish state, is at odds with Halpern’s assertion that, ‘since the rise of Israel, outright opposition to the existence of a Jewish state is no longer recognized by the consensus of the Jewish community as a legitimate attitude.’