Sara Yael Hirschhorn. City on a Hilltop

Few would have thought a group of American liberal Jews, raised in the political culture of 1960s-era social protest, would immigrate to Israel, align with a right-wing settler movement, and repopulate the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria, a region that their sometime leftist allies called “occupied territories” or even “Palestine.” In City on a Hilltop, Sara Yael Hirschhorn traces the unlikely ideological journey of “a group of youthful, idealistic, intelligent, and seasoned liberal American Jewish Zionist political activists who were eager to apply their values and experiences to the Israeli settler enterprise” (15). Whether in the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, or the land east of the Jordan River, American-born Jews played a disproportionate role in the Zionist project’s attempt to expand the modern secular State of Israel into a nation whose borders more closely approximated the contours of the Jews’ ancient homeland. Hirschhorn dives into the middle of a “clash between Jewish-American settlers’ liberal personas and their illiberal project” (20).

Ancient history · Archaeology · Ethnology · Homeland · Ideology · Judaism · Left-wing politics · Middle East · Palestine · Peninsula · Political science · Politics · Zionism · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies