?Hazono Shel Hazony,? or ?Even If You Will It, It Can Still Be a Dream?

Abstract

IN ONE OF THE BEST book reviews ever published, the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff performed a diabolically clever trompe l'eil on Allan Bloom's 7he Closing of the American Mind.1 Rather than present the book as the sober meditations of a learned scholar of the classics, Wolff imagined 7he Closing of the American Mind as a work of fiction, written by Saul Bellow and featuring a cranky University of Chicago professor named Allan Bloom as its protagonist. I must confess that, when reading Yoram Hazony's The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel's Soul,2 I am reminded of the Bloom satire. This is not only because Hazony has a Bloomian (read conspiratorial) fear of the devious designs of liberal academics. Nor is it his considerable powers of reductionism that grind down complex and often disparate chunks of history into a neat pile of dust-all the easier to blow away with glee. It is also because Hazony was educated and intellectually formed in the United States in the midst of debate over The Closing of the American Mind, and hence smack in the middle of the culture wars between the academic