Azure : Ideas for the Jewish Nation

Average Customer Rating: List Price: $26.00 Asia Trips Trips Price: $40.00 Subject To Change Without Notice Availability: Usually ships in 2 to 4 months Manufacturer: Shalem Center
Binding: Magazine First Issue Lead Time: 12-16 Format: Magazine Subscription Issues Per Year: 4 Label: Shalem Center Magazine Type: Trade magazine Manufacturer: Shalem Center Number Of Issues: 4 Publisher: Shalem Center Studio: Shalem Center Subscription Length: 365
Related Items Scientific American
Editorial Reviews: Launched in 1996, Azure is a journal of philosophy, social thought, and cultural criticism providing a forum for scholarship/opinion on issues of concern to the Jewish public in Israel and abroad. Includes essays and articles on Israeli government policy, culture, religion, history, and more.
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: An outstanding Zionist and Jewish journal Comment: 'Azure' is an outstanding journal. Its articles are informatively and often scholarly pieces written by truly knowledgeable people. Among the contributors through the years that I can think of offhand are Yossi Klein -Halevi, Michael Oren, Yoram Hazony. The magazine also has a sense of the cultural character of the Zionist enterprise. One of the most outstanding pieces of work was the scholarship done around Eliezer Berkowitz, one of the great Jewish philosophers of modernity. Anyone who cares about the Jewish world, Jewish life in modern history, Israel, the Zionist enterprise would do well to be reading this periodical. Customer Rating: Summary: Ashkenazi Hard Right and Neo-Con Opinion Magazine Comment: This is a political magazine not for all of Israel, but for certain communities in Israel. It is the political organ of Yoram Hazony and his friends in America. Its an imported hybrid whose style is very alien to Israel. It apes the writing style of men like Podhoretz and Bill Kristol - footnoted and academic on the surface - but shallow and political otherwise. Some have described it as a well financed right-wing Israeli knock-off of Commentary and the new york review of books. The magazine devotes much space to a rather systematic attack of the Israeli left directed from outside the country. Its political leaders, its economics and even its scholars. There isn't much to appeal to Israelis in it really. Much of what it does is done much better elsewhere. The principal audience for this magazine would seem to be Israeli wannabees in New York/Washington and those in America who want Israel to look more like America. I would say that if you like this sort of thing, read the weekly standard. You will get what your really looking for and the voices will be authentic rather than the voice of amatures trying to copy something. Customer Rating: Summary: Excellent Comment: Rare is the magazine that contains superb writing and thought, both philosophical and practical in nature. Azure is one of those. By way of example, permit me to examine the current Summer 2005 issue, beginning in the back, with six book reviews, across a wide spectrum of interest. As a matter of practicality, reading these in-depth reviews will decide the reader on whether or not to buy the volumes covered. The first of these reviews offers the quality and thoughtfulness typical of the entire magazine, in every issue. To open the 33 pages of reviews, Samuel Freedman (author of Who She Was: My Search for My Mother's Life and a journalism professor at Columbia University) in six pages adeptly covers two military titles--Deborah Dash Moore's GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation and Haim Watzman's excellent Company C: An American's Life as a Citizen Soldier in Israel. "For a fatal disease," Freedman opines, "tuberculosis has enjoyed an unusual cachet." He speaks of the tragic personi of Mimi in La Boheme, Violetta in La Traviata, Camille in Dumas' novel of that name, and of course the protagonist in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. Weakness, he goes, on, could be imagined as the tuberculosis of modern American Jewry, "an affliction invested with moral grandeur and artistic insight." What does Freedman mean? One hundred years ago, Zionism "disowned the feeble, bespectacled, and inevitably persecuted galus Yid [Diaspora Jew] in its embrace of the rifle and hoe...." But American Jews today, safe and materially well off, are disquieted completely by "the coreligionist who picks up arms." Against this framework, Freedman discusses two books considering polarly opposite time frames. During World War II, American Jews pridefully took up arms to fight the Nazi menace, and gained acceptance and assimilation as a result. After World War II, discrimination was tamped down, and Jews found increasing entry into all manner of social, educational and economic institutions, the Ivy League colleges from which they had once been severely restricted, country clubs and major corporations. That Jewish attitude towards arms changed mightily following Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, however, following decades of bomb bombardments and terrorist infiltrations into northern Israel from southern Lebanon. This was especially so for Jews born after World War II and the "existential wars of 1967 and 1973." In those eras, Jews fought for their very existence. While the same could be said of Lebanon, the press reversed the Israeli David and Arab Goliath, placing Israel in the giant's role and the Arab Palestinians in place of David. American Jewish pride in sabra soldiers depended a lack of ambiguity, such as that of 1967 and 1973. Thus Freedman returns to the discussion of tuberculosis, and with it, Watzman's Company C, which implicitly "seeks to address this American Jewish ambivalence about military Israel." The book's author has lived in Israel for thirty years, and is no longer American, but nevertheless uses that word in his title. His book follows him through 20 years of reserve duty in the Israel Defense Forces and ends with impending induction of the author's daughter into the same IDF. The book, Freedman notes, is about the connection of soldier and citizen, individual and nation, comrade and comrade. It puts an Israeli face on the classic American World War II movies. Watzman's war is a war worth his service. He accepts the necessity and purpose of service, understanding that while his children and grandchildren may never contract tuberculosis, most people have not taken the vaccine. And tuberculosis, if left untreated, kills. The rest of the Summer 2005 Azure issue is equally intriguing. Take Natan Sharansky's "Political Legacy of Theodore Herzl," a 17-page essay in which the author explains the new meaning that Israel gave to the Jewish people, both in Israel and the Diaspora. Far too late, he notes, the Jewish people and the world "were persuaded that without a national home, the Jewish people would not survive." Still, with the birth of the Jewish state, anti-Semitism has not died, Sharansky writes. For more than 50 years, Israel has served as "a lightning rod of hatred and enmity." But Israel still imbues Diaspora Jews with a sense of empowerment, even in small communities where Jews are subjected to harsh recriminations from those hostile to Israel. Herzl's idea--a state enabling various communities to give voice to their unique heritage and culture on the one hand, while carefully preserving its Jewish character on the other-- "seems more relevant today than ever before." Of equal interest are Alain Finkielkraut's "Religion of Humanity and the Sin of the Jews," a 10-page discussion of the ways in which Europe has recast Israel and the Jewish people in its own image, and Yoram Hazony's "Judaism and the Modern State." Dan Diker reflects upon "A Return to Defensible Borders." And finally, scholar Robert Wistrich outlines in "Cruel Britannia" the ways in which anti-Semitism has gone mainstream in the British isles. For anyone concerned about the survival of Judaism and the Jewish state, Azure is a must-read quarterly magazine. --Alyssa A. Lappen More Reviews