Reviewed by: Desert in the Promised Land by Yael Zerubavel Ranen Omer-Sherman Yael Zerubavel. Desert in the Promised Land. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. xii + 346 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419001089 Given the vast geospatial scale of Israel's desert regions (6,178 square miles or over half its total land area), it is surprising that so few Hebrew studies have been devoted to exploring its cultural implications. There are innumerable books devoted to the urban development of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa but significantly less scholarship addressing the desert's complex, vibrant, and often contradictory cultural role in the formation of Israeli identity, memory, and myth. (By way of full disclosure, I wrote a book that addresses the desert's role as a catalyst for imaginative works by both Israeli and diasporic Jewish writers.) Yael Zerubavel established her reputation with Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (1995), undoubtedly one of the most widely cited works in Israel studies. Now she presents a multidimensional narrative of the Israeli entanglement with the desert as both metaphoric and literal space, a richly complex story that unfolds in compelling detail. Each chapter artfully juxtaposes an excitingly eclectic range of sources (encompassing biblical narratives, children's stories, film, tourism, song lyrics, fieldwork, government archives, photography, and more) to assemble a far-reaching account of land, ideology, and identity. Structured chronologically, in two sections ("Symbolic Landscapes" and "Shifting Landscapes"), the book begins with the formative period of late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine, especially the Orientalist romance of the "Hebrew Bedouin," and in later chapters addresses the growing tensions between desert and settlement in the post-1948 period. This is where Zerubavel breaks entirely new ground. For readers less familiar with the duality of the desert in the ancient Hebraic imagination, she deftly traces the ways that biblical narrative and the rabbinic tradition established "the perception of the desert as the counter-place, the barren and chaotic wasteland" (21), a punitive exile at odds with inhabited or civilized space, a paradigm that would also persevere in various incarnations throughout modern Zionist culture. In the modern era, "history, space, and national ideology were interwoven in the construction of the desert as an 'environmental imaginary' … rooted in Jewish mnemonic tradition and the popular perceptions of the Orient that flourished during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries" (27). Chapter 3 ("Desert as the Counter-Place") examines how the "Zionist decline narrative" [End Page 216] (in which the pastoral biblical landscape had been degraded by centuries of Arab and Ottoman rule) meant that broad swathes of Palestine were characterized as "desert" regardless of their actual topographic character. Here and elsewhere, there is a significant array of visual representations of labor and landscape, which Zerubavel consistently analyzes in fascinating depth. For this reader, a particularly consequential discussion comes in chapter 6 ("Unsettled Landscapes"), which discusses the early role of S. Yizhar, Amos Oz, and other artists in passionately extolling the beauty of the desert wilderness as essential for the health of the nation (a dramatic paradigm shift from the "war against the desert" long dominant in settlement discourse), preparing the way for the "Green Zionism" of later years. Along the way there are perhaps too many instances where the discussion drifts considerably away from the desert itself, or where considerations of the "symbolic" (which often seem to include northern swamps or fertile areas not remotely connected to the country's arid regions) edge out focus on the actual desert, and yet readers interested in wider contexts, such as the gendered nature of Hebrew settlement discourse in early periods, will find much of value here. Fortunately, that blurring dissipates when Zerubavel sharpens her focus on the post-1948 period, when "the Negev became the concrete representation of the desert landscape [as the country's] internal frontier" (92). In chapter 4 ("The Negev Frontier"), she ably documents the fascinating struggle to establish southern settlements, beginning with the long-forgotten early struggles of Beer Tuvia (1888) and Ruḥama (1912), faltering efforts that contrast with the dramatic upswing in activity in the Ben-Gurion era, when the Negev became critical to defending the young country from Egyptian...