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Product Description
In his travels overseas as a reporter for The Boston Globe, Larry Tye found a Jewish world that was being revitalized in ways that were not reflected in what he was reading about the disappearing diaspora and the vanishing Jews of America. His discoveries led him to write Home Lands, a compelling narrative that tells the story of a renewed Jewish diaspora.
Tye picked seven Jewish communities around the world, and in each he zeroes in on a single family or congregation whose tale reflects the wider community's history and current situation. The first impression that emerges from his travels are the cities' differences. Far more striking, however, is what they share-Jews everywhere still have enough customs and rituals in common for outsiders to see them as part of the same people.
Amazon.com Review
Throughout Western history, resilience has been among the most distinguishing characteristic of Jewish communities. Larry Tye's Home Lands: Portrait of the New Jewish Diaspora attempts to shed new light on this timeless quality. Tye, a reporter at The Boston Globe, argues that the traditional dream of the Diaspora, as summarized by the final line of the Passover Sede--"Next year in Jerusalem!"--has changed. Today, he says, Jews "are forever rooted in Israel, but no longer need to live there." The Diaspora no longer wait in hope of returning to the Holy Land; instead they are grounded in the permanent homes they have made and the cultures they have created throughout the world. And the relationships among these communities, he argues, are just as important as the relationship that each one has to Israel. Home Lands tours seven centers of Jewish life, including Dublin, Dusseldorf, and Atlanta. In each case, Tye tells the story of a Jewish community in counterpoint to the story of one representative family. Together, these stories add a deeply personal dimension to Home Lands' political argument. The book's final chapter, about the Jews of Israel, fulfills Tye's promise to describe "a new encounter of equals, to replace the old one where Israel was seen as the center of the Jewish solar system with Diaspora communities orbiting as distant planets." --Michael Joseph Gross
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