9 Quotes by Daniel Gordis

Never does the Tanakh suggest that our being a people means that only we have a right to an ancestral homeland and that other people don’t.

The Tanakh says John Lennon is wrong.

Having people be afraid of you comes with responsibility.

The story of the return of the Jewish people to its ancestral homeland became, in short, one of the great dramas in the history of humankind.

Zionism was centered around the Jewish future and the subject of a Jewish national home – but precisely how those needs ought to be met would remain the subject of often messy and acrimonious disagreement. As much as it was a movement, Zionism was actually a complex and often feisty conversation.

He had an impeccable sense of timing, knew when to wait and when to move, and declared the state even before it was ready, because he knew that another opportunity might never arise. Not.

Amos Oz, who would become one of Israel’s greatest novelists and was several times considered a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature, later recalled that night in his autobiographical memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness. He told how, merely eight years old, he rode on his father’s shoulders in a surging crowd of celebrants in Jerusalem, and at three or four in the morning, still wearing his dirty clothes, crawled into bed.

Herzl promised the readers of Altneuland not only a Jewish safe haven, but a Jewish state that would be a source of progress and continuous growth. That dream, too, has been fulfilled.

Nasser was dead. Israel’s military superiority had effectively neutralized any Syrian threat. Pan-Arabism was a thing of the past. Yet once again, Israel found itself arrayed against another enemy sworn to its destruction.