David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Renaissance

This book offers a reappraisal of David Ben-Gurion's role in Jewish-Israeli history from the perspective of the twenty-first century, in the larger context of the Zionist 'renaissance', of which he was a major and unique exponent. Some have described Ben-Gurion's Zionism as a dream that has gone sour, or a utopia doomed to be unfulfilled. Now - after the dust surrounding Israel's founding father has settled, archives have been opened, and perspective has been gained since Ben-Gurion's downfall - this book presents a fresh look at this statesman-intellectual and his success and tragic failures during a unique period of time that he and his peers described as the 'Jewish renaissance'. The resulting reappraisal offers a new analysis of Ben-Gurion's actual role as a major player in Israeli, Middle Eastern, and global politics.

• Sets Ben-Gurion and his peers within the historical-cultural context of their time and age - the 'Jewish Renaissance'
• Fascinating discussion of intellectual history missing in the previous publications on Israel's history and birth, including in-depth discussion of the Holocaust and its impact on Ben-Gurion and Israeli society
• The story of the birth of the Israeli Army based on heretofore unpublished sources, the road to the 1956 Suez-Sinai Campaign, and the acquisition by Israel of its nuclear infrastructure