Product Description: Israel is a country made up of contradictions. A lively democracy in a multicultural society but within a state promoting a strong national identity; a thriving economy in an unequal society; a culture open to modern trends but drawing on the Hebrew past and preoccupied with the Holocaust and the Arab-Israeli conflict; a sovereign member in the international arena, whose existence is still contested in the Middle East...read more

Product Description: The Politics of Belonging represents an innovative collaboration between political theorists and political scientists for the purposes of investigating the liberal and pluralistic traditions of nationalism. Alain Dieckhoff introduces an indispensable collection of work for anyone dealing with questions of identity, ethnicity, and nationalism...read more

The vulnerability which is the lot of any nation without a state was experienced in a particularly extreme way by the Jews. With the destitution and persecution of many Jewish communities in the 19th century, especially in Eastern Europe, Jews demanded a solution to their uprootedness. This required a state. Alain Dieckhoff recounts the tortuous ordeal through which the Jews reacted to the challenge of modernity. While some contributed to the development of capitalism and put their talents at the service of the Western European states, others threw themselves into revolutionary movements. Yet others imagined ways of "re-nationalising" Jews by transforming them into a nation. Thus the Jews were formidable experimenters who participated in causes with contradictory agendas: assimilation (bourgeois or socialist) or nationalism. The text focuses on Zionism, whose ultimate objective was the creation of a sovereign state for the Jews in Palestine. This required the invention of the Jewish nation. Such an objective meant several things: building a national language, defining a secularized and territorialized Jewish identity, and using military power. This was a difficult enterprise, as the national project was faced with the persistence of communitarianism. But the enterprise was at least partly successful: this process of politicization makes Israel a paradigmatic example of the invention of a nation-state, the main focus of this work. (view table of contents)

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