Eran Kaplan, “Beyond Post-Zionism” (SUNY Press, 2015)

In Beyond Post-Zionism (SUNY Press, 2015), Eran Kaplan locates the post-Zionist debates, which have brought into question some of the core tenets of Zionist ideology, within the context of the changes that Israeli society and culture have undergone over the past three decades.  Beyond Post Zionism also explores some of the key post-Zionist arguments—that Zionism at its core was a colonialist and orientalist movement—by offering a new analysis of key Zionist and Israeli texts from a perspective that emphasizes the historical conditions behind the rise of the Jewish national movement and its growth.  One of the book’s core arguments is that Post Zionism was an ideology that arose out of the optimism of the last two decades of the previous century, when economic and political developments led some in Israel to assert that Jewish nationalism and the Jewish state were historical anachronisms standing in the way of integrating Israel into the global market and the new world order.  In Beyond Post Zionism Kaplan suggests that the series of political crises that Israel has experienced in the new millennium may suggest that the state and its institutions may yet be relevant in the lives of contemporary Israelis just as early Zionism had been for many Jews in the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century, while holding the promise for a resolution of the conflicts that have consumed public life in Israel from its inception.

Yaron Peleg is the Kennedy-Leigh Reader in Modern Hebrew Studies at the University of Cambridge. His most recent book is Directed by God: Jewishness in Contemporary Israeli Film and Television (University of Texas Press, 2016).

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