Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's sweeping study of modern Jewish writing is in many ways a long meditation on the thematics of geography in Jewish culture, what she calls the "poetics of exile and return."
Until the late nineteenth century, Jews were identified in their own religious and poetic imagination as wanderers and exiles, their sacred center-Jerusalem, Zion-fatefully out of reach. Opening the book with "Jewish Journeys," Ezrahi begins by examining...