Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-gq7q9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-23T03:18:37.496Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi. Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination. Contraversions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xii, 358 pp.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2004

James S. Diamond
Affiliation:
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
Get access

Extract

The post-Zionist perspective is a commonplace in political and social discourse these days, and with this book it seeks to ensconce itself in the literary domain. Sidra Ezrahi, who teaches at the Hebrew University, situates herself here in an existential stance antipodal to Yehuda Halevy's: her heart is in the West even as she sits at the edge of the East. Manifestly Ezrahi, in readings of nine writers and poets, has constructed a literary triptych that seeks to rationalize the post-Zionist moment and narrative. What it boils down to is a book that is essentially a detailed gloss, in literary terms, on one of the seminal articulations of Diasporism as the anodyne to the moral ambiguities of political Zionism: George Steiner's 1985 essay “Our Homeland, the Text.”

Type
Book Review
Copyright
© 2003 by the Association for Jewish Studies

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)