Illuminates the importance of Israel for Jews and examines the return to Zion as a significant theological event that can also strengthen the Christian faith. A clear and accessible introduction to the meaning of Israel for the Jewish People and the world.

A window into the Jewish People’s connection to Israel— written especially for Christians. “Israel has taken Jewish sacred history, peoplehood, and ethics out of the realm of speculation and put them into the crucible of real life experience. In returning the Jewish People to its homeland, Israel has returned Jews to material reality—with all its challenges. The Jewish People’s return to the Land returns Judaism to its original vision and the Jewish People to the responsibilities of the biblical covenant.” —from Chapter 9 Along with illuminating the importance of Israel for Jews, this special book examines the Jewish return to Zion as a significant theological event that strengthens the foundations of the Christian faith and its mission. In clear and accessible language, this introduction guides Christians through the essential meanings of Israel for the Jewish People and for the world. It defines Israel as an indispensable part of Judaism’s vision for the Jewish People to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy people,” as a partner with God in the Bible’s sacred covenant. It examines Israel, a sovereign Jewish state, as a safe refuge and home for Jews fleeing persecution anywhere in the world, and how this gives meaning to the Jewish People’s convictions that the future can be more secure than the past. The State of Israel stands at the center of how Jews see themselves today as individuals as well as at the center of the Jewish People’s collective self-perception. As a result, understanding Judaism and the Jewish People is possible only by grasping the Jewish hopes, dreams and experiences that center around Israel, the promised land.

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Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Ari Shavit’s riveting work, now updated with new material, draws on historical documents, interviews, and private diaries and letters, as well as his own family’s story, to create a narrative larger than the sum of its parts: both personal and of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 miracle and meaning of Jewish history."

Our Promised Land takes readers inside radical Israeli settlements to explore how they were formed, what the people in them believe, and their role in the Middle East today. Charles Selengut analyzes the emergence of the radical Israeli Messianic Zionist movement, which advocates Jewish settlement and sovereignty over the whole of biblical Israel as a religious obligation and as the means of world transformation. The movement has established scores of controversial settlements throughout the contested West Bank, bringing more than 300,000 Jews to the area. Messianic Zionism is a fundamentalist movement but wields considerable political power. Our Promised Land, which draws on years of research and interviews in these settlements, offers an intimate and nuanced look at Messianic Zionism, life in the settlements, connections with the worldwide Christian community, and the impact on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Selengut offers an in-depth exploration of a topic that is often mentioned in the headlines but little understood.

Internationally renowned essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans spent five years traveling from across a dozen countries in Latin America, in search of what defines the Jewish communities in the region, whose roots date back to Christopher Columbus’s arrival. In the tradition of V.S. Naipaul’s explorations of India, the Caribbean, and the Arab World, he came back with an extraordinarily vivid travelogue. Stavans talks to families of the desaparecidos in Buenos Aires, to “Indian Jews,” and to people affiliated with neo-Nazi groups in Patagonia. He also visits Spain to understand the long-term effects of the Inquisition, the American Southwest habitat of “secret Jews,” and Israel, where immigrants from Latin America have reshaped the Jewish state. Along the way, he looks for the proverbial “seventh heaven,” which, according to the Talmud, out of proximity with the divine, the meaning of life in general, and Jewish life in particular, becomes clearer. The Seventh Heaven is a masterful work in Stavans’s ongoing quest to find a convergence between the personal and the historical.

A comprehensive examination of Churchill s complex political, diplomatic, and intellectual response to Zionism"

What is a homeland and when does it become a national territory? Why have so many people been willing to die for such places throughout the twentieth century? What is the essence of the Promised Land? Following the acclaimed and controversial The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand examines the mysterious sacred land that has become the site of the longest-running national struggle of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Invention of the Land of Israel deconstructs the age-old legends surrounding the Holy Land and the prejudices that continue to suffocate it. Sand’s account dissects the concept of “historical right” and tracks the creation of the modern concept of the “Land of Israel” by nineteenth-century Evangelical Protestants and Jewish Zionists. This invention, he argues, not only facilitated the colonization of the Middle East and the establishment of the State of Israel; it is also threatening the existence of the Jewish state today.

In this New Studies in Biblical Theology volume, Oren Martin demonstrates how, within the redemptive-historical framework of God's unfolding plan, the land promise to Israel advances the place of the kingdom that was lost in Eden, anticipating the even greater land, prepared for all of God's people, that will result from the person and work of Christ.

A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and won the coveted Aujourd'hui Award in France, Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel's future.