Old New Land

by Theodor Herzl

Book Overview

Old New Land forever altered the face of the Middle East. The book was a nineteenth-century utopian blueprint for a modern state of Israel. There were Jewish settlers in Palestine, and Zionist ideas had existed in Eastern Europe before Herzl, but Herzl made Zionism into a cultural and political movement acceptable to Western governments and intellectuals. His prophecy at the end of this book became reality: "If you will it, it is not a...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1558761608
• ISBN13: 9781558761605
• Release Date: December 2000
• Publisher: Markus Wiener Publishers
• Length: 340 Pages
• Weight: 1.23 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Comments from New York Review of Books

"Altneuland (Old New Land) is one of the most remarkable books of the twentieth century. . . . Altneuland is a blueprint of the perfect Jewish state, a technocratic utopia, a socialist dream with all the advantages of capitalism, an idealistic colonial enterprise, a model of pure reason, a `light unto the nations.' It also helps to explain the extremism of some of those who rebel against the dominance of what is widely regarded as the arrogant West. "By the 1920s, in Herzl's tale, Jerusalem would be transformed into a thoroughly modern metropolis. . . . Arab and Jew would live happily together in the New Society, working in vast `co-operative syndicates.'. . . Herzl could not possibly have foreseen [the tensions to come], and yet the seeds of tragedy are already buried in this text, which was well meant, deeply idealistic, and in many ways typical of everything that people who feel so victimized by the West that they wish for its destruction fi nd most hateful." --The New York Review of Books