Book Reviews 141 interested in seeing an "inside" perspective ofthis period oftime. However, readers must be aware of the characteristic that this review has tried to highlight, the political perspective and agenda ofthe author. A recent book of a similar nature, Summing Up by Yitzhak Shamir, describes a number ofthe same events covered in this volume, but with a different perspective, and with some consequently different conclusions about who deserves credit and who deserves blame. Ultimately it will be up to history to decide which ofthe political actors ofthe day was most perceptive; for now all we can do is to try to understand what happened, why events that came about developed as they did, and what we can do to repeat successes and avoid failures. To the extent that Arens' book Broken Covenant contributes to that process, readers may be grateful to have it available. Gregory Mahler Department ofPolitical Science University ofMississippi The Masada Myth: CoUective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel, by Nachman BenYehuda . Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1995. 401 pp. $60.00 (c); $22.95 (P). The story of Masada is one of the anchors ofIsraeli identity. It is also, for the most part, not true. How does a myth become a widely accepted truth? Nachman Ben-Yehuda, a sociologist at Hebrew University, together with his many student assistants, set out to find the answers. With its wide variety of materials and methods, their study is by far the most detailed history ofthe Masada myth and as such a fascinating "take" on the history ofIsrael itself It is also a valuable contribution to the rapidly growing field of inquiries into the d}namics ofcollective memory, offering a rigorously empirical testing ground for a number ofkey theoretical propositions. The book's strength lies in the balance it strikes between the specific and the general, privileging a reader interested in the story, jargon-free writing certainly helps. Yet precisely because it aims to tell a story, the use of a non-chronological approach is a curious choice. For rather than retrace the symbolic functioning of Masada over time with a wide-angle lens, as it were, the text zooms in on a few select areas-youth movements, the Army, textbooks, media, art. And while each becomes subject to historical analysis, the separate threads joining' in the end, it takes hard work to retain the larger contextual picture throughout. It also, of necessity, introduces a fair amount of repetition, as each new narrative is judged against the base-line found in the account by Joseph Flavius. Analytically, the strategy is sound; documenting the myriad distortions ofthe original (and only) record ought to convince the most skeptical of readers. Practically, the editorial structure is an understandable, though not inevitable, result of relying on narrow-cast 142 SHOFAR Spring 1997 Vol. 15, No.3 projects undertaken by students. Intellectually, however, something is definitely lost. How this book is read will very much depend on the reader. Ben-Yehuda is well aware ofits potential to offend; indeed, it was his own deeply felt outrage at the discovery that the story of Masada was a myth that prompted him to do the study. Yet this is not a newsbreaking story; analyses by other scholars abound. What is new here is both the scope and the detail. For students ofcollective memory like myself, the very richness ofthis account is rewarding. It is still all too rare, for example, to encounter in-depth treatment of the sites ofnational remembrance; the lead taken by Pierre Nora and his collaborators in France is hardly visible in the English-speaking world. .For students of Jewish memory, though, The Masada Myth cannot but resonate with our understandings of "heroism" in both the Zionist narratives and the post-Holocaust debates. The questioning of how the Israelis had dealt with the challenges posed by the Holocaust memory is finally fully under way, together with the much more self-critical look at Israeli identity-building. While the present book engages both of those themes, the author, in my view, treads much too carefully. He criticizes, for example, the often made comparisons between Masada and the Warsaw ghetto, as mistaking "false" and "true" heroism; the...
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Jul 1, 2023
Julia Cagé + 3
Open Access
