100 books like The Iron Cage

When I first started reading this book, I could not put it aside. I read it again recently, in the wake of the October 2023 Hamas attack, and found it as relevant as when it was first published.

Scholarly and accessible at the same time, it showed me why Israel’s overwhelming military power has failed to bring peace to the Holy Land. While much of the literature on this controversial subject looks like militant propaganda, I like the tone of Shlaim’s book: serene, compassionate, and not at all polemical. 

It always intrigued me how Zionism as a political movement and Israel as its embodiment can claim to act on behalf of the Jewish people. Sand brilliantly explains that the specific conditions of Jews in Eastern and Central Europe, particularly discrimination and violent outbursts (pogroms), produced a sense of nationhood.

As a historian, I am fascinated by Sand’s account of Zionist ideologues from that part of the world manufacturing powerful myths, which have buttressed the new Israeli identity even among Jews transplanted to Israel from Asia and Africa, where this kind of Jewish nationalism had been virtually unknown. 

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.  

My earlier work on Jewish opposition to Zionism focused mostly on ultra-orthodox Jews. This book introduced me to a different kind of religious Jews affiliated with the Reform movement.

These communities and their spiritual leaders, including Elmer Berger, opposed Zionism for different reasons. They embraced the United States as their homeland and no longer considered themselves in exile. They also found Zionist ideas akin to those of the antisemites, who consider the Jews a separate nation. 

As the Israel-Hamas conflict rages in 2024, Palestinian writers shed light on the trauma and violence of dispossession and colonization in this anthology translated from Arabic to English.

Through the controlled, curated form of poetry, eminent authors Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, and Fadwa Tuqan join emerging writers, several of them women, in narrating the Palestinian experience from 1948, the beginning of the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) to today.

This book is about geography and identity, the ground beneath one’s feet and belonging, origins and history, displacement, and diaspora. There is longing everywhere in the book for what was lost—home, family, tribe, community, and culture. There is also the plight of powerlessness, occupation, and enslavement. The words that express the loss and mourning of the Palestinian people are haunting and memorable, perhaps because they are translated from Arabic, a flowery and lyrical language.

When we hear about 33,000 dead Palestinian civilians,… show more.

This is an astonishing memoir, told by one of the women bombers, Zohra Drif, so memorably portrayed in Gillo Pontecorvo’s film Battle of Algiers. A retrospective account, first published in French in 2013 to great acclaim and great controversy, Drif explains her motivations in clear and direct prose. She traces why and how she becomes a member of the National Liberation Front, willing to go to the most extreme lengths to liberate her country from colonial oppression. As such this memoir is full of telling historical details, not least in terms of the daily drip-drip violence of settler colonialism and the huge mirror violence this engendered. More specifically, this memoir provides us with a remarkable insight into the thoughts and emotions of the Battle of Algiers in 1956 and 1957, when small tightly organised groups of FLN fighters confronted the French paratroopers in the Casbah of Algiers: a key… show more.

A watershed work in the new history of “the global Cold War” in the Third World, where Cuba’s revolutionary government acted with remarkable audacity to offer material, human, and military support to African revolutionaries (with the Soviet Union often a minor player). Gleijeses performed archival feats in Cuba, Africa, and the U.S. to bring together this many-sided portrait of skullduggery, intimate solidarity, and Cuban revolutionary agency.  

Books that blur the boundaries between political theory and international history are seldom accessible, of pressing contemporary relevance, and beautifully written—but I found this book to be all three.

Reading this outstanding exposé, the book vividly reminded me of the importance of understanding the decades of decolonization in the Black Atlantic as more than a quest for sovereign statehood and recentering the ways in which the likes of Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere imagined new geographies and, indeed, new worlds. I admire the work in many ways—for its geographical sweep, exemplary pace, and conceptual clarity.

At a time of death and destruction in Gaza, this book is one of the only volumes that brings to the English language reader some of the voices from inside a small strip of land that has been under siege by land, sea, and air for sixteen years.

Although the quality of the writing is variable, I found that the rawness of the collection made the writers seem more intimate. With some gutsy writing by women and tender pieces by men, the anthology subverts assumptions and provides a wide heterogeneity of voices to the fore. 

My Promised Land is beautifully written, a story deeply informed by the author’s family history and the body of knowledge he built as an influential Israeli journalist.

Shavit loves the place of his birth but doesn’t retreat from hard questions. He tells a powerful, poignant story of a state-created out of tragedy and the brutal reality of what Jewish statehood has wrought for yet another disinherited group.

There are no easy answers, and Shavit offers none. But he presents the complexities and frustrations with intellectual rigor and literary grace.