Books like Covenant Brothers — picked by fans

I’ll probably still be citing this book when they drag me into professorial retirement, yelling, “Did you know that popular representations of Israel as a hypermasculine superman helped justify the U.S.-Israeli alliance, particularly after 1967?!” “Obviously,” my colleagues will yell back, “that’s only one of the reasons why we are still assigning this book, even during the great 2051 AI-Robot rebellion!”

McAlister’s Epic Encounters came out around 2001 as many Americans were wondering, “Why do they hate us?” The ones that did not grab the Qur’an (wrong era, peeps!) or rightwing polemics, grabbed this excellent history of U.S. interests in the Middle East. McAlister interprets that word, “interests,” broadly, offering a holistic account of how Americans – not just diplomats – have imagined Southwest Asia and North Africa throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

This book contains significant touchpoints, from 1950s Biblical Epics to Black Power’s connections with… show more.

In this absolutely fascinating read, Thomas deftly explodes the myth that the United States brought religious freedom to Japan during the post-World War II occupation. The first part of the book explores pre-war notions of religious freedom in both countries and the second part looks at the various misunderstandings that ensued as the United States sought to impose its conception of religious freedom on Japan. Thomas offers a skilled reading of religious culture in both countries and ably explains the outcomes of U.S. occupation policies.

Although there is no shortage of books on the 28th president and his foreign policy—we even use “Wilsonian” as a shorthand for the embrace of idealism, liberal internationalism, and democratic capitalism in U.S. foreign relations—Burnidge’s work offers an exceptional exploration of how religion and religious ideas informed Wilson’s approach to world affairs. She sets her chronicle of Wilson’s life and spiritual development within the context of the broader religious history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and weaves in expert analysis of the relationship between Wilson’s Christianity, race, and racism in that era. This provides a compelling foundation for her discussion of the Protestant beliefs that shaped Wilsonian internationalism during World War I and beyond. Engrossing, revealing, and extraordinarily smart, this is a key book for those interested in Wilson, World War I, and the global Progressive Era, not to mention the underpinnings of liberal… show more.

This is a magisterial work and the perfect starting point for anyone interested in learning about how religious beliefs and religions of all types have played a role in U.S. foreign policy since the colonial era. It is an incredibly comprehensive and deeply researched book, but do not let its heft deter you—Preston is a skilled narrator and you will find yourself immediately immersed in and absorbed by the stories he shares. His ability to illuminate the links between religion and the core ideas that have guided the U.S. engagement with the world over the past four hundred years is a truly impressive achievement.

Crump was a Christian theologian (Calvin University) for many years whose passion for justice took him to Israel/Palestine on numerous occasions.

He not only studied the issues surrounding this conflict, but he immersed himself, living in a refugee camp during some of Israel’s most severe periods of occupation.

But behind America’s support for Israel is often a less-understood set of doctrines called Christian Zionism. This book is the premier explanation of this movement and is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why the American church sends millions of dollars to Israel every year.

Anyone wishing to understand the history of modern Israel will find all questions answered in this beautifully written account beginning in the 19th century and continuing to the end of the 20th.

Sachar’s eloquence is stunning, and his attention to detail means that nothing is left undefined or ambiguous. There are quite a few histories of Israel on bookshelves, but none of them comes near Sachar’s work in perceptiveness or reach.

If only all histories were written as well!

This book upended my understanding of the reactions of Zionist leaders to the Holocaust and its survivors, the Seventh Million.

I found the story of how the need to build the Zionist state in Palestine affected their attitudes toward the Holocaust fascinating. Segev helped me feel the pain of those remnants of European Jewry who encountered disdain, neglect, and opprobrium when they reached the shores of the Promised Land. His treatment of collaboration between Zionist and Nazi officials is both sensitive and dispassionate.

This book opened my eyes to a whole range of uses of the Nazi genocide in Israel’s public relations and justification of military and foreign policies.  

I loved how the book looks at Zionism from a totally different angle, not just as history or ideology, but as a bold and thoughtful belief in human action. By going back to European ideas and exploring key Jewish and Hebrew thinkers from the 19th and 20th centuries, I gained a fresh way of understanding the roots of Zionism.

It also helped me see current Israeli politics in a new light. Instead of the usual political analysis, it made me think more deeply about the ideas and values that still shape things today.

I was assigned this book in the first class I took that dealt with the Arab-Israeli conflict, and I found it to be a thought-provoking anthology of writings produced by Zionists, going back to rabbis and intellectuals of the mid-1800s and forward to Zionist activists, like David Ben-Gurion, in the 1950s. (One should perhaps be aware that Hertzberg published the original edition of this volume in 1959; it was reissued by JPS in 1997 with all the original source texts but with the addition of a reflective afterword by Hertzberg, who died in 2006.)

As a teacher, I appreciate that Hertzberg offers representative sections of longer texts, like those by Pinsker and Herzl. My personal favorites are Ahad Ha’am, the “agnostic rabbi” and critic of Herzl, and Judah Magnes, an American rabbi seeking to reconcile Zionism with Judaism's spiritual and ethical heritage.

Koestler is famous for Darkness at Noon, his 1940 novel of Stalinist totalitarianism. But in 1949, he wrote this remarkably perceptive history of the British Mandate, from its inception to the birth of the State of Israel.

This is not a traditional history backed by myriad footnotes. But it is, to borrow a phrase usually reserved for journalism, the “first draft of history,” as it was written in real-time just as the Jewish state rose to life. Koestler was closely tied to Zionism from the ‘20s on, having spent several years in Palestine as a manual laborer and then a journalist. Later he was even deputy of the right-wing Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky in Berlin, labored intensively on behalf of Israel’s establishment, and reported from the country in its first weeks of existence.

This is a hugely illuminating book from a gifted and insightful observer.