This handbook and dictionary aims to provide the reader with a general overview of Zionist history and historiography, to tabulate all data on Zionism, and to gather in one source as many terms dealing directly or indirectly with Zionism and Jewish nationalism as possible.

A provocative look at the centrality of desire for the Land among early settlers in pre-state Israel"

The authors speculate on the relationship between identity and citizenship in Israel.

divdivThis 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 demonstrates how professionals and settlers continually innovated plans for both rural and urban frontiers in response to the competing demands of social and political ideologies and the need to achieve productivity, economic independence, and security in a hostile environment. In the 1930s, security became the primary challenge, shaping and even distorting patterns of growth. Not until the 1993 Oslo Accords, with prospects of compromise and accommodation, did planners again imagine Israel as a normal state, developing like other modern societies. Troen concludes that if Palestinian Arabs become reconciled to a Jewish state, Israel will reassign priority to the social and economic development of the country and region. /DIV/DIV

The key theme of the papers in this book concerns the prospects of building new urban environments and creating new societies in Europe during the interwar years. The contributions do not focus on the system of government – communist, fascist or democratic – but, rather, on what actually got built, by whom and why; and how the international communication of ideas was filtered through the prism of local concerns and culture. As such, the volume serves to tease out connections between urban form and social aspirations, and between the moral basis of social planning and how it was interpreted. Did the new towns of the interwar years actually create a planned society where visions met realities, aided by the design of new urban forms? This is one of the principal questions investigated by the contributors here in all the different political contexts of their chosen ‘new towns’.

Land, Credit and Crisis presents a new understanding of the financial culture of the Bible. Biblical Palestine was characterized by an over-abundance of arable land combined with a chronic lack of manpower and agricultural credit - circumstances which lead to much prophetic fulminating against merchants and the rich. The book reveals how the financial instruments and institutions of the time reflected a tough economic realism and argues that the image of the biblical prophet as a champion of social justice must be revised.

This book describes the history of Jewish mysticism, introducing the wide-ranging and varied mystic writings known collectively as the "Heikhalot" and the "Merkavah" literature, with its description of mystic spiritual elevations, and meetings between the mystics and superior beings-and even with God. Explains Jewish mysticism's relationships to parallel streams of thought, both within and outside Judaism.

"Between these two points in time, Professor Gorny examines the intellectual and spiritual complexities in 'Public Thought', examining the topic of collective identity of the Jewish people throughout the world, focusing particularly on Jewish identity in the USA and Israel, and also touching on the Anglo-Jewish community. Taking a multi-dimensional approach, the author compares the thoughts and attitudes of various Jewish groups, and seeks to understand the ties that bind them through the prism of theological, academic, political and ideological discourse concerning the Holocaust and the State of Israel. This book raises an important issue: can the Jews, scattered around the free world, be a nation without their unique bipolar ethos? Can the Jewish people survive the trend towards universalism, which even now is undermining their unique ethnic status?"--BOOK JACKET.