Jacques Kornberg - Böcker

"An original and brilliant thesis, exposing a long misunderstood figure. A great book." —Bernard Avishai"Excellent . . . a highly revealing portrait that demolishes Herzl-the-icon." —Michael Marrus"Other biographers . . . have illuminated aspects of [Herzl's] life, but none has been able to produce the kind of intellectual biography that we have here. Jacques Kornberg has done an admirable job of plumbing the depths of Herzl's mind to try to come to an understanding of just why he became a Zionist and why he was literally consumed with promoting Zionist goals." —Cithara"With compassion and critical balance, placing his subject well within his Austrian milieu, Kornberg analyzes Herzl's rhetoric, tergiversations, and profound ambivalence over his politics and identity." —Choice" . . . a masterful display of the sources . . . " —American Historical Review" . . . stimulating, provocative and agreeably iconoclastic . . . powerful and compelling." —German HistoryA novel and provocative explanation of Theodor Herzl's founding of Zionism as a way of resolving his personal crisis over his Jewish identity.

A founding father of modern Israel, Ahad Ha-am (1856-1927) was one of the shapers of the contemporary Zionist consciousness. His career spanned the era of Russian Jewry's nationalist awakening. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, he was the leading theorist of the Russian Zionist movement. Afterwards, he was overshadowed by Theodore Herzl, who imposed his own stamp on Zionism. With the failure of Herzl's diplomacy and his early death in 1904, Russian Zionists abandoned Herzl's priorities and gradually refashioned the program of the Zionist organization in their own image. More than anyone else, Ahad Ha-am provided the ideological authority for this shift.Until At the Crossroads, there were no up-to-date studies of Ahad Ha-am. This long-awaited collection includes 14 essays by internationally known scholars in modern Jewish history and literature. The essays range from studies of Ahad Ha-am as a literary stylist, his role in the revival of Hebrew, his political thought and activity, his debates with famous contemporaries about the Jewish future, and the reinterpretation of his ideas by his Zionist disciples. The overall picture presented by this book is a new image of Ahad Ha-am-far less Westernized and far more embedded in the nineteenth-century Jewish and Russian cultural milieu than was previously thought.

Pope Pius XII presided over the Catholic Church during one of the most challenging moments in its history. Elected in early 1939, Pius XII spoke out against war and destruction, but his refusal to condemn Nazi Germany and its allies for mass atrocities and genocide remains controversial almost seventy years after the end of the Second World War.Scholars have blamed Pius’s inaction on anti-communism, antisemitism, a special emotional bond with Germany, or a preference for fascist authoritarianism. Delving deep into Catholic theology and ecclesiology, Jacques Kornberg argues instead that what drove Pius XII was the belief that his highest priority must be to preserve the authority of the Church and the access to salvation that it provided.In The Pope’s Dilemma, Kornberg uses the examples of Pius XII’s immediate predecessors Benedict XV and the Armenian genocide and Pius XI and Fascist Italy, as well as case studies of Pius XII’s wartime policies towards five Catholic countries (Croatia, France, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia), to demonstrate the consistency with which Pius XII and the Vatican avoided confronting the perpetrators of atrocities and strove to keep Catholics within the Church. By this measure, Pius XII did not betray, but fulfilled his papal role.A meticulous and careful analysis of the career of the twentieth century’s most controversial pope, The Pope’s Dilemma is an important contribution to the ongoing debate about the Catholic Church’s wartime legacy.