The good news (euangelion) of the crucified and risen Messiah was proclaimed first to Jews in Jerusalem, and then to Jews throughout the land of Israel. In Jerusalem Crucified, Jerusalem Risen, Mark Kinzer argues that this initial audience and geographical setting of the euangelion is integral to the eschatological content of the message itself. While the good news is universal in concern and cosmic in scope, it never loses its particular connection to the Jewish people, the city of Jerusalem, and the land of Israel. The crucified Messiah participates in the future exilic suffering of his people, and by his resurrection offers a pledge of Jerusalem's coming redemption. Basing his argument on a reading of the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel of Luke, Kinzer proposes that the biblical message requires its interpreters to reflect theologically on the events of post-biblical history. In this context he considers the early emergence of Rabbinic Judaism and the much later phenomenon of Zionism, offering a theological perspective on these historical developments that is biblically-rooted, attentive to both Jewish and Christian tradition, and minimalist in the theological constraints it imposes on the just resolution of political conflict in the Middle East.

The State of the Jews examines the current predicament of the Jewish people and the land of Israel, both of which still stand at the storm center of history, because Jews can never take the right to live as a natural right. The volume comprises celebrations and attacks. Edward Alexander celebrates writers like Abba Kovner, Cynthia Ozick, Ruth Wisse, and Hillel Halkin, who recognized in the foundation of Israel shortly after the destruction of European Jewry one of the few redeeming events in a century of blood and shame. He attacks Israel's external enemies�busy planners of boycotts, brazen advocates of politicide, professorial apologists for suicide bombing�and also its internal enemies. These are "anti-Zionist" Jews, devotees of lost causes willfully blind to the fact that Israel's creation was an event of biblical magnitude. Indifference to Jewish survival during World War II was the admitted moral failure of earlier American-Jewish intellectuals, but today's "progressives" and "New Diasporists" call indifference virtue, and mistake cowardice for courage. Because the new anti-Semitism, tightening the noose around Israel's throat, emanates mainly from liberals, Alexander analyzes both antisemitic and philosemitic strains in three prominent Victorian liberals: Thomas Arnold, his son Matthew, and John Stuart Mill. The main body of Alexander's book is divided generically into history, politics, and literature. At a deeper level, its chapters are integrated by the book's pervasive concern: the interconnectedness between the state of Israel and the spiritual state of contemporary Jewry.

The emerging Jewish national consciousness in Europe toward the end of the 19th century claims many spiritual fathers, some of which have been seriously underestimated so far. Zionist intellectuals such as Moses Hess, Leon Pinsker and Isaac Rülf were already committed to the self-liberation of the Jewish people long before Theodor Herzl. Their experiences and observations brought them to believe that the emancipation and integration of Jews were not realistically possible in Europe. Instead, they began to think in national and territorial terms. The author explores the question as to what extent religious messianism influenced the ideas of these men and how this reflects in today's collective Israeli consciousness. In a comprehensive epilogue, Julius H. Schoeps critically correlates ideas of messianic salvation, Zionist pioneer ideals, the settler's movement before and after 1967, and the unsolved conflict between Israelis and Palestinians which has been lasting for over 100 years -- From publisher's provider