Daniel Gordis - Menachem Begin: Israel’s Jewish Prime Minister

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 4 March 2014

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Reviled as a fascist demagogue by his great rival David Ben-Gurion, venerated by Israel's underclass, the first Israeli to win the Nobel Peace Prize, a proud Jew but not a conventionally religious one, Menachem Begin was both complex and controversial. Begin's Herut party led the opposition to the Labor governments of Ben-Gurion and his successors until the surprising parliamentary victory of 1977 made him Israel's Prime Minister.

Listen as Daniel Gordis, author of Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel's Soul, discusses Begin's life, political vision, and his abiding legacy in Zionist thought, Israeli politics, and the Middle East today. The event was recorded before a live audience on March 4, 2014 at the Tikvah Center in New York City.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Jonathan Silver. I'm the director for academic programs at the Tikva Fund.
0:06.7	I'm very pleased to welcome you this evening to the Tikva Center.
0:10.2	Our guest tonight really needs very little introduction.
0:13.1	Rabbi Dr. Daniel Gordis is the Senior Vice President and Corrette Distinguished Fellow at Chelan College,
0:23.5	a regular columnist for the Jerusalem Post, a frequent contributor to the New York Times,
0:27.6	print and online editions.
0:29.9	He's written really too many books to name,
0:31.9	but tonight we're here to celebrate the publication
0:34.5	of this new book, Menachem Begin,
0:38.3	the Battle for Israel's Soul.
0:40.3	It was released this very day by Next Book
0:44.3	in partnership with Random House.
0:47.3	It's something that the TIFA Fund is very proud of
0:50.3	and I hope that you'll find interesting.
0:52.3	It just occurred to me. If you walk through Barnes & Noble, look on Amazon,
0:58.3	you'll see Oodles, countless books about the American founding and the American founding fathers.
1:04.7	These are distinguished statesmen.
1:07.3	They're studied as founders.
1:09.6	But it's almost impossible to study the founders of the state of Israel,
1:15.5	really the heroic rebirth of the ancient civilization, the heroic story of our age.
1:21.8	It's impossible to study them as founders in the same way.
1:25.5	And at the TIFA fund, we hope that this book, this study of
	...

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