With Eyes Toward Zion (review)
Drinan, Robert F.
REVIEW WITH EYES TOWARD ZION ROBERT DRINAN Edited by Moshe Davis 252 pages... $18.00 Arno Press, New York, 1977 This learned volume is the outgrowth of a scholars' conference on America-Holy...
...He traces the extraordinary influence of the Hebrew language and the Jewish religion on America's sense of self-identity, American literature and even on place names with Biblical origin (there are 27 U.S...
...Hence this collection of essays by 12 historians on the impact of the concept of the Holy Land on American thought and action...
...Nathan M. KaganofT, editor and librarian at the American Jewish Historical Society writes that: "A comprehensive study of the America-Holy Land relationship has not been published...
...In the gathering storm over America's role in the Middle East, those people who understand the intimate and intense parallelism between America's ideals and the objectives of the Holy Land will be a resource whose value will be immense...
...Moshe Davis, professor at Hebrew University...
...18.00 Arno Press, New York, 1977 This learned volume is the outgrowth of a scholars' conference on America-Holy Land studies held at the National Archives in Washington in 1975...
...The most perceptive of the essays is that written by Dr...
...Other contributors to this volume, a work intended primarily for researchers, dwell on the pervasive and profound Protestant piety that centers on the Holy Land, Zion and the tribes and trials of the people of Israel...
...The emphasis in this collection is always on bibliography and the necessity of research into the amazingly unexplained interactions between American spirituality and Hebrew history...
...With Eyes Toward Zion restricts itself to American diplomatic, ethnic, cultural and religious concepts of the Holy Land prior to the founding of the State of Israel...
...The two-score scholars at that meeting agreed that the Holy Land, or Zion, is a part of America's continuing spiritual history, but that the bibliography on this topic was seriously deficient...
...Those who absorb the rich new material in this book will be well equipped to explain more persuasively America's relationship to the Holy Land since 1948...
...towns named Salem...
...However, the present state of research clearly indicates that contacts between the two geographical areas, even before the Twentieth Century, ran the entire gamut of relationships normally prevailing among countries in modern times...
...Indeed a comprehension of the spiritual, theological and Biblical components of those relationships would help to illuminate the reasons why the United States Congress has in the past few years responded to Israel's needs by sharing with that nation some ten billion dollars of economic and military assistance...
...A complete knowledge of those relationships would be uniquely helpful in understanding the nature and background of America's present commitment to the State of Israel...
Vol. 3 • October 1978 • No. 10
