Glory and Agony: Isaac's Sacrifice and National Narrative

by Yael Feldman

Overview

Glory and Agony is the first history of the shifting attitudes toward national sacrifice in Hebrew culture over the last century. Its point of departure is Zionism's obsessive preoccupation with its haunting "primal scene" of sacrifice, the near-sacrifice of Isaac, as evidenced in wide-ranging sources from the domains of literature, art, psychology, philosophy, and politics. By placing these sources in conversation with twentieth-century thinking on human sacrifice, violence, and martyrdom, this study draws a complex picture that provides multiple, sometimes contradictory insights into the genesis and gender of national sacrifice.

Extending back over two millennia, this study unearths retellings of biblical and classical narratives of sacrifice, both enacted and aborted, voluntary and violent, male and female—Isaac, Ishmael, Jephthah's daughter, Iphigenia, Jesus. Glory and Agony traces the birth of national sacrifice out of the ruins of religious martyrdom, exposing the sacred underside of Western secularism in Israel as elsewhere.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804759021
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	09/01/2010
Series:	Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	440
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Yael S. Feldman is Abraham I. Katsh Professor of Hebrew Culture at New York Universityand the author of No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation in Israeli Women's Fiction (1999), a National Jewish Book Awards Finalist; its Hebrew version won the Friedman Prize for Hebrew Literature.

Read an Excerpt

Glory and Agony

Isaac's Sacrifice and National Narrative

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By Yael S. Feldman

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5902-1

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Chapter One

Martyr, Victim, Sacrifice, Warrior

Tears! More tears! More grief and heartache! Strike! Burn! Stoke high the fires! Let me too see the pyres and the rivers of blood! Let me share the bliss of all the massacred and slaughtered! —M. Z. Feierberg, 1899 Motherland! Why do you demand such sacrifices? —Z. Shatz, 1918 I, however, saw them differently. Not as victims/sacrifices [qorbanot], but rather as conquerors, climbers, like those alpine mountaineers, who with a void gaping at their feet keep marching up, breathing rarefied air. —Rachel, 1928 The great hour has arrived for the people of Israel—the hour of the war of liberation, suffused with heroism and blood, the bliss of aqedah and the agony of sacrifice, and above all hope sings for the redemption and revival of the dispersed of Israel. —Passover Haggadah, Na'an, 1949

In spring of 1949, as the Israeli War of Independence was drawing to a close, a surprisingly new Hebrew phrase adorned the Passover Haggadah of Kibbutz Na'an: osher aqedah. This phrase successfully captured the pathos of the moment by joining together the trope of the aqedah, the "Binding of Isaac," with the noun osher—generally understood to mean 'happiness' or 'bliss.' For present-day readers, however, this zeugmatic turn of phrase is not easy to digest. In retrospect, the oxymoronic attribution of "bliss" to the classic sacrificial trope, associated for millennia with Jewish devotion to God, persecutions, and martyrdom, seems rather disturbing.

In fact, it was precisely because of such a concern, if not alarm, that this long-forgotten Passover Haggadah was brought to my attention in the first place. Clearly, from the vantage point of the heady "post"-days of the early twenty-first century, such high valorization of death, albeit for a noble cause, is somewhat difficult to take, even for native Israelis who are well aware that in their national ethos Isaac has long become the emblem of fallen warriors. All the more so for those familiar with the bitterly sarcastic use of the aqedah in the well-known English antiwar poem "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young." Penned by the British poet Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) shortly before his death in the trenches of World War I, this poem caustically points a blaming finger at "the Fathers," embodied here in the figure of the reluctant Abram, who would not "offer the Ram of Pride," but instead "slew his son, / And half the seed of Europe, one by one."

We often forget, however, that this celebrated negative use of the biblical trope was composed at the end of the war, reflecting the hindsight disillusionment that would permeate the pacifist, antiwar literature written after World War I. Yet, as Ivan Strenski has recently argued, "the force of this disillusionment with sacrifice can only be appreciated against the background of at least a generation's worth of cultural formations—including a whole literature—extolling sacrifice, which immediately preceded it." Indeed, Strenski's study of the contest over religious and civic sacrifice in France amply documents "a chilling ethic of sacrifice," based, he argues, on the sacrificial images of the Catholic Eucharist, and replete with happy, "joyful" giving (55) and idealized "bloody sacrifices" (77) "like Christ on the cross, the altar of the world" (55). When it comes to French Jews, they have similarly "responded to the call of nationalism," Strenski contends, enthusiastically "bringing to bear [...] the sacrificial past of the ancient Jewish religion" (87). With few exceptions, mostly of the cosmopolitan kind (86), "Abraham's intention to sacrifice Isaac became exemplary for modern French Jews facing the coming war with Germany" (84).

Ironically, it was left to a Protestant thinker Raoul Allier to creatively reread the biblical Sacrifice of Isaac. Asking why Abraham "hesitated," he built on this ostensible hesitation a paradigm for a "proper Christian attitude to sacrifice" (92), based on a theology of "a God of life," a Protestant ethic that denies "war as a divine institution" (91). Although Strenski argues that Allier "embellished the narrative beyond the text-value" (92), he sees in Allier's 1915 sermons on the war "the beginnings of a process of how religiously informed sacrificial public policies are contested" (93–94). This process seems to have filtered from sermons to literary protest, best known perhaps through Henri Barbusse's novel Feu (Under Fire, 1916; ibid., 53) and its poetic counterpart, Owen's 1918 "Parable" on the enacted Sacrifice of Isaac of World War I.

The 1949 kibbutz Passover Haggadah reflects then a climate in which a religiously colored national sacrifice is extolled just as it had been in Europe around the turn of the century. As we shall see, it would take Israeli discourse another decade and another war to follow in Allier's, Barbusse's, Owen's (and others') footsteps and to begin stripping Israeli national sacrifice of its heroic bliss, turning it instead into an object of filial rage and revolt.

This intriguing process, the transition from glory to agony and then to agon, or 'the oedipalization of the aqedah' as I label it, is the subject of Part II of this book. The subject of Part I, on the other hand, is a question that is yet to be asked: When, in fact, did the secularization of the Hebrew aqedah begin, and how did it turn from a narrative of religious overtones into a trope for heroic national sacrifice?

The answer to this question is not self-evident, and not only because of the difficulty of distinguishing the national-secular from the religious in Judaism's special brand of ethnic religion. Popular wisdom will probably point to the 1940s, the decade that had to grapple with both the Shoah and the Israeli War of Independence. Historian Anita Shapira, however, has attributed the phrases "the love of sacrifice" and "the joy of aqedah" (simhat ha'aqedah) to the Zionist forefathers in the early twentieth century, such as Berl Katznelson (1887–1944) and his generation (the Second Aliya [wave of immigration, 1904–1918]).

Still, a close examination makes clear that these idioms were rather rare in early twentieth-century literary and political writings. As I show in this chapter, "the myth of heroism and sacrifice" did dominate the language of the first two aliyot (1882–1918), indeed across the political and generational divisions: from the leadership through the rank and file, on the right and on the left, by European-born pioneers as well as young "natives." The figure of the aqedah was not, however, central to their ethos and rhetoric. "Sacrifice" (qorban)—yes; "martyrs" (harugei malkhut, the legendary "Ten Martyrs" killed by the [Roman] empire), and "Sanctification of the Name" (qiddush hashem)—yes; but aqedah (the Binding of Isaac)—not really.

Given the ubiquity of the aqedah in Israeli cultural and political discourse, this discovery must come as a surprise. The question then is when and why did the rhetorical shift from "qiddush hashem" to "aqedah" occur, and what did it signal for the ethos and psychology of incipient Jewish nationalism?

I probe this shift in the following pages in an attempt to outline its special dynamic and unravel its cultural significance. In particular I explore two fascinating aspects: first, the continuity of Jewish religious martyrological terms within an ostensibly secular socialist Hebrew culture, the very framework of the new national discourse; second, the unmistakable mark of a Russian impact. By the latter, I do not mean just the general absorption of the revolutionary ideologies of nineteenth-century Russia ("the love of sacrifice" already pointed out by Anita Shapira), but rather a direct semantic transference from the Russian language.

This transference was facilitated, I argue, by a similar (though not identical) semantic problem shared by Russian and Hebrew. As noted in the Introduction, Hebrew uses one word to cover both active (agentic) and passive senses that in most languages are split between two lexical signifiers (sacrifice versus victim). A similar overlap exists in Russian. Thus in both languages the word used for "sacrifice" (qorban in Hebrew; zhertva in Russian) represents polar and almost opposing semantic fields. In both, moreover, there is a double tension, of congruence and contrast, between the religious root of the concept "martyr" and its secular transmutations (as in the concepts "heroism and sacrifice" or "heroic deed" [gevura vehaqrava, alilot gevura in Hebrew and podvig in Russian]).

To complicate matters further, I suggest looking at this tension through the lens of gender. I therefore begin by exploring the gender trouble of one of the heralds of Zionist ideas in the Hebrew Revival literature, the novella Le'an? (Whither?) by M. Z. Feierberg (1875–1899). Was it only a coincidence, I wonder, that the tale about "the mad Nachman," perhaps Zionism's first literary sacrificial victim on the altar of the new ideology, invokes not the aqedah—destined to become the ultimate rhetorical figure of Zionist ethos—but rather the biblical story of female virgin sacrifice—Jephthah's daughter (Jud. 11)?

In what follows I propose that this choice was no accident since no other biblical story so fully represents the tragic tension between active, virile, agency, the embodiment of both heroism and sacrifice-of-the-other (especially of one's progeny), and feminine passivity, the emblem of victimhood and the loss of one's own life. It was this tension, I argue, that perfectly served the young Feierberg as a vehicle for addressing the core dilemma of nascent Jewish nationalism—the transition from (feminine?) passivism to (masculine?) activism, from religious heroism of the spirit to the fully embodied heroism of political secular rhetoric. As such it will serve as a prelude to my probe, in Chapters 1 and 2, of the various meanings of and attitudes toward the concept of qorban in Palestine from the early days of the twentieth century to the Balfour Declaration (1917), the ensuing establishment of the Jewish Legion in World War I, and its aftermath.

Nachman's "Madness": Between Jephthah the Warrior and His Martyred Daughter

Le'an? (1899), Feierberg's only novella (published posthumously), is a Zionist proto-text that questions the borderline between religious and national redemptions, while also challenging their shared demand for sacrifice. In contrast to the expectations of contemporary critics, however, who somewhat anachronistically interpret the novella in light of the Jewish and Israeli preoccupation with the aqedah, the young author chose to imagine the roots of his protagonist's madness through the story of Jephthah's daughter. It seems that the narrator's instincts were right, for no other story in the Hebrew tradition rivals the story of Jephthah in the way it maps the tension between masculine heroism and feminine victimhood over two intersecting conflicts—the generational and the gendered (in contrast to the father-son paradigm, the father-daughter paradigm involves a sex/gender difference as well).

In Feierberg's story, the boy Nachman is pushed by his father, the elderly rabbi, to devote his life to the redemption of this world. Curiously, this project is cast in a military image, "an army man" (ish tzava), rather than in the language of self-sacrifice. Nachman is required to become one of the few chosen ones "who are picked to serve for all the people," because "more than three thousand years ago God gave us His Torah and made us His soldiers. We are the army of God and of all that is 'holy' in this world." The role models for the members of "God's army" are "the Prince Don Isaac Abrabanel and Rabbi Menasshe ben Israel," claims the father, because "they gave up everything—their lives, their fortunes, their honor—to martyr themselves for God" (ibid., 95; Heb. 55–56).

How come? the reader may ask. Surely it was not martyrdom, nor "dying for God" that these two sages of the Torah, separated by some hundred and fifty years (1437–1508 and 1604–1657, respectively), share, since each of them died a "natural" death. Rather, what they had in common was precisely the dedication of their lives to their people, not only as spiritual leaders but also as practical politicians who greatly furthered the earthly lives of their congregations among the nations. Is Feierberg proposing here—through the voice of the unsuspecting old rabbi—a revision of the traditional concept of qiddush hashem, famously defined as yehareg ve'al ya'avor (one should let oneself be killed rather than transgress)? Is this why he created the seemingly impossible combination between two apparently contradictory linguistic figures—"soldiering" and "qiddush hashem," militarism and martyrdom?

Indeed, this paradoxical amalgamation is reiterated frequently by the father: "Our holy ancestors were true soldiers who shed their blood like water so that God's work will be done" (al qiddush shem shamayim; lit. for the sanctification of the Heavenly Name) (ibid.). If the father is not aware of the inner paradox of his rhetoric, however, Nachman apparently is. He is therefore not convinced. In his view it is precisely the idler Alter (habatlan), the only devout yeshiva student (hamatmid, lit. the perpetual student) who shares with him the deserted beit midrash (house of study), that is really "the model soldier his father wanted him to be" (97; 58). Since Alter is obviously miles away from any economy of (active) sacrificing of life and shedding of blood, no wonder "a bitter smile played over Nachman's lips" (98; 58).

What, however, does Nachman himself want? What is the ideal in whose name he rejects his father's demand that he become a soldier "for his people"? Feierberg does not spell this out directly. We learn about the boy's aspirations only indirectly, in an associative chain listing his emotional reactions. First, refusing his father leads him to "depressing thoughts" that "bring tears to his eyes"—a rather stridently 'feminine' reaction in view of the belligerent imagery marking the father's language ("the Law of the Father"?). And if that does not suffice, his own weeping reminds Nachman of "the story he has recently read in the Book of Judges and of the tears that flowed from his eyes then too" (ibid.). And why?

A wave of longing swept over him. He was jealous of Jephthah's daughter. Behold the mountains and valleys matted with grass, the summer days, the good, pure air [...] and she went for long walks with her friends, lost in pleasure of all these.

It is not to the heroics of Jephthah the "mighty warrior" (Jud. 11:1) that the boy Nachman looks up, but rather to his unnamed daughter, the one who accepted her fate submissively, asking only for permission to "wander on the mountains and bewail her virginity"—a truly "unheroic conduct," to borrow Daniel Boyarin's contentious title. Significantly, the daughter's contribution to the rescue of her people is not at all what catches Nachman's eye and heart—in contrast, for example, to her brief appearance in Y. L. Gordon's epic poem, "Bimtzulot yam" (From the Depth of the Sea), where a young Jewish virgin prefers to "die honorably, saving my people in my death like Jephthah's daughter."

Nachman's wish to join that allegedly idyllic female tableau cannot be granted, however. His conflicted inner world is torn not only between rabbinical Judaism and the tradition of the Kabbala, between the world of sanctity and the Evil Inclination, between messianic redemption and national revival, between tradition and modernity—but also between two opposing psychological economies: the masculinist martial toughness of his father's language and the images of passive feminine pleasure through which he envisions Jephthah's daughter. Moreover, as if to banish from the minds of his (1890s) readers any doubt about Nachman's identification with Jephthah's daughter rather than her father, the narrator leads him on to an associative recollection of the female heroine of Song of Songs (100; 60), and from her—it is only natural— to the Daughter of Israel (Knesset Israel) of the midrashic legends.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Glory and Agony by Yael S. Feldman Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations....................ix
Preface and Acknowledgments....................xi
Foreword....................1
Introduction: Sacrifice for Gods and Country: Practice and Theory....................11
1. Martyr, Victim, Sacrifice, Warrior....................41
2. Re-Inventing "Isaac" as a Military Hero....................70
Interlude: The Land of Isaac....................107
3. Binder or Slaughterer? The Rise and Fall of "Abraham"....................131
4. Virgin Martyrs, Then and Now: A Tale of "Dream and Darkness," 1966....................183
5. Sacrificial Victims? The "Isaac Generation," 1967–1973....................215
6. Mania, Murder, and Gender Mayhem, 1975–1995....................264
Afterword: "A State of Exception": A View from the Present....................311
Notes....................319
Index....................407

Editorial Reviews

"Feldman's study stands as a role model for continuing investigations of biblical tropes in modern literatures; indeed her book may even remain the crowning study of the binding of Isaac as a literary trope. But one thing is certain—its readers are unlikely to ever again encounter any kind of sacrificial narrative without harking back to Feldman's observations."

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies - Yael Halevi-Wise

"Glory and Agony is an excellent intellectual study that probes into the heart of contemporary Israeli identity while situating and arguing its construction in two mutually inclusive contexts: Jewish tradition and Western thought and philosophy. Clearly an academic work of the highest standards, this important book presents an outstandingly well thought out argument for reconsidering the violent nature of our conduct: personally, collectively, nationally, and globally-universally."

Tel Aviv University - Hannah Naveh

"This fascinating, multifaceted, and erudite book traces the use of the narrative(s) of the 'binding of Isaac' (Hebrew Akedah) or 'sacrifice of Isaac' (English) in twentieth-century secular Israeli literature. It discusses the various and changing ways in which the motif of a father's willingness to sacrifice his son to God has been turned into a secular metaphor for military self-sacrifice and heroic death in battle . . . Feldman's book is both very enjoyable and highly thought provoking, and I can recommend it whole-heartedly."

Review of Biblical Literature - Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer

"This book by Yael Feldman presents a detailed, complex and sometimes provocative study of the way writers, poets, dramatis, critics, some scholars, and a few visual artists in the State of Israel during the last century have dealt with this account. . . This brief summary only begins to suggest the variety and complexity of material covered in this book. Anyone who knows the Israeli literary scene will find this book an illuminating discussion of that scene and a significant contribution to it."

Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception - William Sheperd

"The achievements of this [book] are outstandingly intriguing . . . Glory and Agony is a highly condensed, analytic encyclopedia of the trope of sacrifice in Western culture."

The Journal of Israeli History - Iris Milner

"Yael Feldman's Glory and Agony: Isaac's Sacrifice and National Narrative is a dazzling synthesis of political and religious history, particularly the history of the State of Israel and the tradition of Biblical interpretation that, to one's surprise, structures and determines it. This is a new way of writing history. Using the paradigmatic Biblical story of Isaac's binding as her template, Feldman shows that Israeli history, far from leaving the past behind, is actually a recapitulation of the history of Jewish theology, beginning with its invention of human sacrifice and the tradition of putting it to cultural use through centuries of interpretation. It is a true and audacious history, and one bound to draw both praise and fire."

New York University - Perry Meisel

"Feldman's book is extremely important and a much needed contribution; a Hebrew version is a desideratum. I know of no other comprehensive study of the akedah, the Sacrifice of Isaac, that compares to this superb multidisciplinary investigation of the Hebrew sources, that demonstrates a rare erudition in both the Jewish tradition and contemporary literature, that suggests original links and connections, and that offers very productive comparative readings."

Cathedra: Journal for the Study of Land-of-Israel [Translated from Hebrew] - Galili Shahar

"I find this book to be an outstanding work: it daringly broaches a topic of enormous scope and yet renders a review that is insightful, scholarly, and nevertheless accessible to the informed lay reader. Its presentation is unique, undertaken as an exploration, tracking the evolution of the discourse on sacrifice in order to arrive at the present moment. Feldman adeptly and convincingly shows how the archetypal myth of Isaac, interwoven throughout human history, has been absorbed into and projected by works of fine arts and belles lettres."

University of Haifa - Nitza Ben-Dov

"In one of the most comprehensive and impressive historiographies of Hebrew national culture, Feldman elegantly yet passionately presents a multi-dimensional narrative of the Israeli preoccupation with Genesis 22 . . . [N]ew and fresh . . . Feldman's book is an outstanding achievement that is likely to engage scholars and readers for many years to come."

Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations - Neta Stahl

"Feldman's first-rate interdisciplinary study demonstrates not only how modern ideologies produce re-readings and rewritings of ancient myth but also how ancient myths weight and reshape these very ideologies. A must read for any reader interested in Hebrew culture and the psyche of modern Israel, and an insightful read for inquisitive readers at large."

Jerusalem - Menachem Brinker

"Feldman has undertaken an ambitious project [and] ranges over an abundance of literary material . . . [M]assively detailed and comprehensive . . . One of the book's strengths is that it helps demonstrate the significance of modern Hebrew culture to a wider audience."

Association for Jewish Studies Review - Naomi Sokoloff

"Yael Feldman's Glory and Agony: Isaac's Sacrifice and National Narrative is an enthralling engagement with one of humanity's most ancient and consequential tropes . . . Though there have been numerous studies of the ever-evolving and sometimes oppressive nature of this myth, none has come close to providing the kind of brave interdisciplinary acumen Feldman's scholarship delivers . . . Glory and Agony is a work of forceful originality yet always meticulously researched, containing illustrative, provocative epigraphs as well as nearly ninety pages of informative and lively notes that engage with extraordinarily eclectic sources."

Religion and Literature - Ranen Omer-Sherman

"Despite the vast historiography [of Akedat Yitzhak], Yael Felman's contribution is significant. Glory and Agony presents and interprets Modern Hebrew literature of the trope of Akedat Yitzhak in the Palestine and the State of Israel of the twentieth century . . . Readers with access to Hebrew will derive the most from this thoroughly engaging text. Everyone will learn much from a careful reading."

University of California, Berkeley - Paul Howard Hamburg

"Despite the vast historiography [of Akedat Yitzhak], Yael Felman's contribution is significant. Glory and Agony presents and interprets Modern Hebrew literature of the trope of Akedat Yitzhak in the Palestine and the State of Israel of the twentieth century . . . Readers with access to Hebrew will derive the most from this thoroughly engaging text. Everyone will learn much from a careful reading."—Paul Howard Hamburg, University of California, Berkeley


"Yael Feldman's Glory and Agony: Isaac's Sacrifice and National Narrative is an enthralling engagement with one of humanity's most ancient and consequential tropes . . . Though there have been numerous studies of the ever-evolving and sometimes oppressive nature of this myth, none has come close to providing the kind of brave interdisciplinary acumen Feldman's scholarship delivers . . . Glory and Agony is a work of forceful originality yet always meticulously researched, containing illustrative, provocative epigraphs as well as nearly ninety pages of informative and lively notes that engage with extraordinarily eclectic sources."—Ranen Omer-Sherman, Religion and Literature


"This book by Yael Feldman presents a detailed, complex and sometimes provocative study of the way writers, poets, dramatis, critics, some scholars, and a few visual artists in the State of Israel during the last century have dealt with this account. . . This brief summary only begins to suggest the variety and complexity of material covered in this book. Anyone who knows the Israeli literary scene will find this book an illuminating discussion of that scene and a significant contribution to it."—William Sheperd, Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception


"Feldman's book is extremely important and a much needed contribution; a Hebrew version is a desideratum. I know of no other comprehensive study of the akedah, the Sacrifice of Isaac, that compares to this superb multidisciplinary investigation of the Hebrew sources, that demonstrates a rare erudition in both the Jewish tradition and contemporary literature, that suggests original links and connections, and that offers very productive comparative readings."—Galili Shāhar, Cathedra: Journal for the Study of Land-of-Israel [Translated from Hebrew]


"In one of the most comprehensive and impressive historiographies of Hebrew national culture, Feldman elegantly yet passionately presents a multi-dimensional narrative of the Israeli preoccupation with Genesis 22 . . . [N]ew and fresh . . . Feldman's book is an outstanding achievement that is likely to engage scholars and readers for many years to come."—Neta Stahl, Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations
"Feldman has undertaken an ambitious project [and] ranges over an abundance of literary material . . . [M]assively detailed and comprehensive . . . One of the book's strengths is that it helps demonstrate the significance of modern Hebrew culture to a wider audience."—Naomi Sokoloff, Association for Jewish Studies Review
"The achievements of this [book] are outstandingly intriguing . . . Glory and Agony is a highly condensed, analytic encyclopedia of the trope of sacrifice in Western culture."—Iris Milner, The Journal of Israeli History
"Feldman's study stands as a role model for continuing investigations of biblical tropes in modern literatures; indeed her book may even remain the crowning study of the binding of Isaac as a literary trope. But one thing is certain—its readers are unlikely to ever again encounter any kind of sacrificial narrative without harking back to Feldman's observations."—Yael Halevi-Wise, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
"This fascinating, multifaceted, and erudite book traces the use of the narrative(s) of the 'binding of Isaac' (Hebrew Akedah) or 'sacrifice of Isaac' (English) in twentieth-century secular Israeli literature. It discusses the various and changing ways in which the motif of a father's willingness to sacrifice his son to God has been turned into a secular metaphor for military self-sacrifice and heroic death in battle . . . Feldman's book is both very enjoyable and highly thought provoking, and I can recommend it whole-heartedly."—Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer, Review of Biblical Literature
"Feldman's first-rate interdisciplinary study demonstrates not only how modern ideologies produce re-readings and rewritings of ancient myth but also how ancient myths weight and reshape these very ideologies. A must read for any reader interested in Hebrew culture and the psyche of modern Israel, and an insightful read for inquisitive readers at large."—Menachem Brinker, University of Chicago and Hebrew University, Jerusalem

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