Old New Land: (Altneuland)

by Theodor Herzl

Book Overview

The Old New Land is a utopian novel by Theodor Herzl (1860 - 1904), the founder of political Zionism. Outlining Herzl's vision for a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, this book became one of Zionism's establishing texts. It was translated into Hebrew as Tel Aviv, which directly influenced the choice of the same name for the Jewish-Zionist Jaffa suburb founded in 1909, which was to become a major Israeli city.This book was originally published in...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1491045140
• ISBN13: 9781491045145
• Release Date: June 2012
• Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" 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