Rating: 
Summary: If the Jews did not exist, the Anti-Semite would invent them
Review: I paraphrased a line from Jean Paul Sartre for the title of my review to make a point: If someone is inclined towards anti-Semitism, then almost anything they read can encourage them. Everything from "The Believer" to the Bible itself, if you read the right passages. If someone is not, however, then even the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and "Mein Kampf" won't change their mind.There's also a large pool inbetween, by which I mean people who don't feel the need to go out of their way to express themselves as either anti- or pro-Semitic. I'm not a Jew; Judaism is not part of my idenity. Neither is Hinduism or Sikhism, for that matter. Therefore, I don't go out of my way to show that I have an opinion on the matter. Instead, I tried to learn as much as I can with an open mind. If you truly believe anti-Semitism is wrong as its core, not because you happen to be the target of its vileness, but because it is demonstratably WRONG, then my approach shouldn't trouble you. Nor should this book. I give it four stars because it is well written and very interesting. It is 100% correct? I have no idea. I intend to read more, as much as I possibly can in this life. It will contribute to my understanding of the issues, whether I find more evidence to support it or disprove it. An anti-Semite doesn't need this book, but it will fuel his misguided views the same any other book would. A dedicated Jew doesn't need this book, but it might inspire him to attempt to disprove its thesis. I look forward to reading that book when it comes out as well, particularly if its written in the spirit of enlightening its readers, not demonizing its opposition.
Rating: 
Summary: Hardly Anti-Semitic
Review: I read this book while a student of Dr. Mezvinsky at Central Connecticut State University. After seeing some of the reviews criticizing it as anti-Semitic I felt compelled to offer a few remarks. Firstoff, I believe that while the book presents a critical, controversial history of Jewish fundamentlism it can hardly be characterized as anti-Semitic. Those who feel this way are the same people who blantantly refuse to acknowledge the illegality of Israel's continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and policy of settlement expansion in these territories.
Secondly, I want to say that while Professor Mezvinsky is perhaps not a widely reknowned scholar he does possess an outstanding knowledge of the topic and again it is ridiculous to label him as anti-Semitic. It is true that he strongly disagrees with the pro-Jewish policies of the state of Israel, but this simply means that he is more of a human rights advocate than his critics would like one to believe.
Rating: 
Summary: Harsh but Accurate
Review: It is not an accident that the major political crimes committed by Israelis have been committed by members of their religious right--the Hebron massacre and the assassination of Rabin. This book explains the ideology underlying these terrible acts. It should also be understood that Shahak is writing as a human rights activist, not as a scholar of Judaism--he is trained as a chemist--so the the book focuses on the problems inherent in fundamentalist Judaism and ignores the many positive aspects. I do not understand, however, why a man like Shahak has chosen to co-author a book with man of Mezvinsky's limited academic stature. I checked the social science citation index and found that, unlike serious scholars on the Middle East like Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris, almost no one cites his work. For his next book, Shahak should choose another, better coauthor.
Rating:
Summary: Settler Ideology
Review: Jewish fundamentalism is only rarely considered in the Western press--try looking up references to Gush Emunim, the settler's movement, in the NY Times index, to find how well its tenets have been explained to the American public. Try looking up "Jewish fundamentalism" and contrasting the number of results with "Islamic fundamentalism" to get some idea of the magnitude of the bias in the media on this topic, so crucial to understanding the wars of our time. Shahak and Mezvinsky have done us a great service by providing a coherent and well researched explanation of the ideologies of the fundamentalists in Israel, and how they influence the policies of the state. The authors have, they explain, decided to use as their primary sources documents that are explicitly not written in English, and are therefore not only less accessible, but more honest than the sanitized works written for the gentiles. Their contribution provides a powerful introduction to those who wish to gain some understanding of the real basis for the mess in the Middle East, which has finally dragged the US into a full scale war and occupation of Iraq. The root cause of the conflict is that the fundamentalists, who are comprised of several different groups, mostly agree on their predestined occupation and settlement of the West Bank. They have managed to bring along the political world of the secularists, embodied in the Likud and Labor parties, who have provided the wherewithal to generate and support the settlements consistently over the years, whatever the stage of the "peace process" currently in vogue. The book is clearly written, well organized, incredibly informative, and a must read for all Americans.
Rating:
Summary: Guarded Praise
Review: No religious community is monolithic. Many people who consider themselves devout dissent from certain aspects of their religions. One cannot assume that because some sage wrote something thousands of years ago that modern adherents necessarily act on those passages.
The failure to make the above point clear, especially in light of two thousand years of anti-Semitic persecution, is a serious flaw in an otherwise good book. The reader unfamiliar with Judaism might erroneously conclude that all observant Jews agree with the more extreme passages cited by Shahak and Mezvinsky but, in fact, many do not.
The authors have done an excellent job dissecting one part of the spectrum that is Judaism. Yes, ther are observant Jews who are racist, discriminatory, and advocate violence. I was reminded of that when talking to a formerly secular friend who has become observant. He returned home from a West Bank Yeshiva and openly laughed about settlers who shot Arabs guilty only of quarrying stone for their houses.
Still, these fanatics do not represent all of Judaism.
On a personal note, I have met both Shahak and Mezvinsky. The world has never seen a finer human being than the late Israel Shahak. His years of suffering in the Warsaw Ghetto and Bergen Belsen left him with a deep sensitivity for the oppressed. He was a secular saint.
Mezvinsky is another person altogether, but I really can't comment.
Jessica Ramer
Rating:
Summary: Guarded Praise
Review: No religious community is monolithic. Many people who consider themselves devout dissent vigorously from certain aspects of their religion. It is good to remember this basic fact of human nature when reading Shahak and Mezvinsky's book. The failure to make the above point clear, especially in light of two thousand years of anti-semitic persecution, is a serious flaw in an otherwise good book. It would also have been helpful for the writers to have reminded readers that Jewish law is just that: law, a body of ideas subject to interpretation, revision, and dissent. The authors have done an excellent job dissecting one part of the spectrum that is Judaism. Yes, there are rabbis who are racist, discriminatory, and advocate violence. I was reminded of that when talking to a formerly secular friend who has become observant. He returned home from months at a West Bank Yeshiva and openly laughed about settlers who shot Arabs guilty only of quarrying stone for houses. Still, these fanatics do not represent all of Judaism. However, I agree with Shahak and Mezvinsky and applaud them for having the courage to expose that element of it. On a personal note, I have met both Shahak and Mezvinsky. The world has never seen a finer human being than the late Israel Shahak. His years of suffering in the Warsaw Ghetto and Bergen Belsen left him with a sensitivity for suffering and a compassion for the oppressed. He was a secular saint. Mezvinsky is another person altogether. He once canceled a meeting with me by telling me his sister had died. She was very much alive--I spoke to her on the phone myself. All of us lie to get out of things we don't want to do but most of us don't kill off our family. He was also full of stories about working for the FBI as a consultant, investigating terrorism, getting shot at, being in safe houses, and other similar nonsense. Of course, being a terrorist target never stopped him from showing up at his univeristy office on time! My experiences with him made me doubt the truth of anything he writes because I can't believe that someone who comes up with such large and unnecessary lies could be trusted to find a balanced interpretation of such an emotionally-loaded subject like Judaism. Jessica Ramer
Rating:
Summary: Honest, but sobering depiction of Israeli politics
Review: Shahak explains in vivid detail various strains of Jewish fundamentalism and their political ambitions. Having come from a religious background, he describes accurately the mindset which the ultra-orthodox have and their motivations.
Rating:
Summary: Freaky Facts
Review: The authors bring everything together with enviable clarity and with an ususally sharp eye for research. The facts they uncover will FREAK you out. Should be required reading in school.
Rating: 
Summary: misinformation
Review: The book, co-authored Shahak is grounded in the assumption that Judaism is inherently bad. Shahak, a chemistry professor was better known for his condemnation of Israel and Jews. Among Shahak's many tidbits of misinformation are false allegations that Jews don't use "+" symbols in arithmetic because they are "crosses," and the false allegation that observant Jews ritually defile Christian cemeteries. They also provide misinformation on the Talmud and Kabbalah. Although one can find excellent English translations in context of Talmud and much of the Kabbalah and even online information, most people may well rely on a published book like this. Those that do will be grossly misinformed.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Insider Story (from the other side of the fence)
Review: The great Israel Shahak offers here a vast review of the various fundamentalist forces, all of them rooting pretty deep in historical traditions, that are still very much at play in the intrinsically complicated arcanes of modern-day political Israel. Many of his sources, although very well-known to the average Israeli, remain for the most part totally unknown to the occidental public. By publishing such an in-depth analysis and overview of religious fundamentalism in Israel and the very active role it plays in everyday Israeli politics, Israel Shahak makes an attempt to warn non-informed audiences of the potentially devastating effects for Israeli secular Jews, the Palestinian people and the middle East in general, of a too strong influence of Israel's religious parties such as Agudat Israel, Degel Ha'Torah, Shas, including some of the most extremistic (messianic) tendancies of NRP, Emunim and Gush Emunim, the religious settlers that believe to be harbouring the messianic redemption through settlements in Gaza and on the West Bank -- BTW, if you happen to believe that Zionism has an indisputable religious and talmudic foundation, which it obviously clearly has not (cf. Bab. Talmud, Ketouvot, Tractate 111a), please check out the Neturei Karta web-site, or "Battle for God" by Karen Armstrong, which does highly accurately depict this religious movement and its staunch position towards Zionisms of all sorts by Yoel Teitelbaum, Amram Blau, and so forth... In his attempt at providing unbiased information to what he regards as the resurgence of a potentially dangerous form of modern-day Hebrew "Khomeinism", Israel Shahak proposes to enumerate (or repeat) a few (strongly racial, or ethnocentric, if you wish) factors of some Kabalistic lores and Talmudic traditions, the majority of which are most of the time either totally unknown, or just galantly ignored by occidental press/media/public. After a description of the Israeli Haredi culture and its religious traditional roots, intended for the average traditional occidental ignoramus, Israel Shahak goes on to depict the public perception in Israel of such tragedies as the Baruch Goldstein massacre (relating the fact that he was of Chabadian background), and a few other less known (but no less tragic) episodes, such as the attempted bombing of the Dome, attempted terrorist bombings of Jerusalem autobuses used by secular Jews on Shabbath, and other activities of the Jewish underground. The book ends with a rather vast historical and religious background of the political assasination of Itzhak Rabin by Yigal Amir, by analyzing some of its talmudic and traditional rabbinic roots, giving a rather vast historic overview of the "redef" and "moser" incriminations and the condemnations that have thereby repetitively happened throughout European Jewry. By reading this book, one is also able to glean a great deal of other interesting historical informations (very often obscured, censured or shunned by traditional self-flattering Jewish historians) on various historical topics. Maimonides, for example, the great and often virulent condemner of heresies, was actually considered to be himself a heretic by a few of his contemporary Rabbis, and could still today be considered as an heretic, at least by his own definition of heresy. One also learns that European intra-Jewish persecutions (sometimes based on either religious, financial, totally irrational reasons, or a combination of these) have often rivalled, if not exceeded, persecutions incurred by Jews through non Jews... One finally tends to give credit to the author's view that traditional Judaism (which is often rather naively depicted as a return to a "golden age"), did indeed imply many harsh persecutions, unjustices and irrationalities, as democracy hardly seems to be a Jewish invention, as was bitterly experienced by many liberal thinkers and reformers, such as Baruch Spinoza given the Anathema-Excomunication (Kherem) in Amsterdam by a contemporary Rabbinical court (as to its effectiveness, it is today still not known whether Spinoza ever talked to a Jew again since his Excomunication-Ban, which happened in his early twenties). Let it be said that Spinoza himself found himself relatively lucky to live in a relatively modern and progressive city such as Amsterdam, as many of his liberal predecessors, contemporaries and followers, in other countries such as Spain, Germany, Poland, Russia, etc. did not have that luck, and did not fare that well, as history evidenced some extreme cruelty amongst Jews, which only Gentile influence was able to dampen and limit... One is finally left with the impression that having been a Jew in Germany was an altogether totally different thing than having been a Jew in Poland, or in France, or in the Netherlands, or in Great-Britain, intra-Jewish persecutions appearing to have been virtually nill in the latter (the history time-frame, just as in the USA, was there of course also much shorter). Shahak, among a few other interesting questions and enquiries (such as whether Kabalah can still be considered as monotheism, and whether Judaism, as a practised religion, has had any fixed tenets throughout its history), also debunks the Masada myth by showing that its alleged heroes (the Masada episode and its actors have in fact not once been named in the vast amount of talmudic and post-talmudic literature) were nothing less than murderous Sarkarikin (vulgar dagger-assassins or terrorists, that committed most of their vile actions upon peacefull peasant, and sometimes even pious, fellow-Jews). The Masada Sarkarikins are unfortunately still regarded as Jewish heroes by many contemporaries. Israel Shahak was a courageous and highly ethical man that stood up for ethics, human concern, clearsighted rationality, historic authenticity, and the belief that some things need to be told the way they are, and remains for me some kind of a very remarkable individual, a humble and decent heroe in his own time.
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