One Step before the Abyss: Recent Scholarship on the Jews in Occupied Soviet Territories during the Second World WarAndrej Angrick and Peter Klein, The Final Solution in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation, 1941–1944. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. xi + 517 pp.Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, trans. Ora Cummings. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem/Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. xvi

Abstract

This chapter presents a number of book reviews which span the topics of Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East. The first book explores the history of the Mizrahi resistance to the Ashkenazic hegemony in Israel. The next is a study of Gush Emunim and the history of religious fundamentalism of Jews in Israel. Other books reviewed here focus on the history of the har habayit or the Temple Mount, a holy site for both Jews and Muslims, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's view on the question of whether Zionism and the establishment of the state of Israel represents a messianic realization, the concept of Zionist leader Max Nordau's muscular Judaism and the way it evolved and became incorporated into the larger Jewish national movement.