Twelve Tribes
Promise and Peril in the New Israel
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- ¥1,500
発行者による作品情報
“Ethan Michaeli has a gimlet eye for the people, texture, and contradictions of modern Israel. I’m in awe of his powers of observation and his ability as a modern-day Tocqueville to take us inside one of the most complex and confounding countries in the world." — Jonathan Alter, bestselling author of His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life
An "illuminating" and "richly descriptive" (New York Times Book Review) portrait of contemporary Israel, revealing the diversity of this extraordinary yet volatile nation by weaving together personal histories of ordinary citizens from all walks of life.
In 2015, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin warned that the country’s citizens were dividing into tribes: by class and ethnicity, by geography, and along lines of faith. In Twelve Tribes, award-winning author Ethan Michaeli portrays this increasingly fractured nation by intertwining interviews with Israelis of all tribes into a narrative of social and political change. Framed by Michaeli’s travels across the country over four years and his conversations with Israeli family, friends, and everyday citizens, Twelve Tribes illuminates the complex dynamics within the country, a collective drama with global consequences far beyond the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians.
Readers will meet the aging revolutionaries who founded Israel’s kibbutz movement and the brilliant young people working for the country’s booming Big Tech companies. They will join thousands of ultra-Orthodox Haredim at a joyous memorial for a long-dead Romanian Rebbe in a suburb of Tel Aviv, and hear the life stories of Ethiopian Jews who were incarcerated and tortured in their homeland as “Prisoners of Zion” before they were able to escape to Israel.
And they will be challenged, in turn, by portraits of Israeli Arabs navigating between the opportunities in a prosperous, democratic state and the discrimination they suffer as a vilified minority, as by interviews with both the Palestinians striving to build the institutions of a nascent state and the Israeli settlers seeking to establish a Jewish presence on the same land.
Immersive and enlightening, Twelve Tribes is a vivid depiction of a modern state contending with ancient tensions and dangerous global forces at this crucial historic moment. Through extensive research and access to all sectors of Israeli society, Michaeli reveals Israel to be a land of paradoxical intersections and unlikely cohabitation—a place where all of the world’s struggles meet, and a microcosm for the challenges faced by all nations today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Michaeli (The Defender) paints an intriguing if underdeveloped portrait of the "often fraught dynamics among the religious factions, ethnic traditions, and political affiliations within Israel today." Drawing on interviews with Palestinian Israelis, ultra-Orthodox Jews, politicians, reporters, and small business owners, among others, Michaeli delves into seldom-discussed topics such as the campaign to ban fraud-prone "binary options" financial trading in Israel, and the "sedentarization" of the once-nomadic Bedouins, many of whom live in illegal villages in the Negev desert. Though Michaeli notes the "fractious relations of Israel's different sectors," he doesn't draw a clear framework for understanding these tensions, and somewhat shortchanges important demographic groups including the poor, Anglo immigrants, the Israeli army, and young Israelis who struggle to afford an apartment and other necessities. Michaeli packs in plenty of revealing anecdotes, but he occasionally lapses into unenlightening shorthand, such as when he refers to the "American superstructure imposed on Israel/Palestine's economy and politics" without fully explaining what he means. Though Michaeli is a skilled interviewer and a vivid scene-setter, this colorful yet meandering tour of modern-day Israel lacks depth.
