In Palestine no one understood his uniquely American pragmatism and insistence that a constitutional system was foundational for a just society. Like a prophet unable to suppress his prophecy, Magnes could not resist a religious calling to take political action, whatever the cost. This comprehensive intellectual biography of Judah Magnes-the Reform rabbi, American Zionist leader, and inaugural Hebrew University chancellor-offers novel analysis of how theology and politics intertwined to drive Magnes’s writings and activism-especially his championing of a binational state-against all odds. JUDAH MAGNES: THE PROPHETIC POLITICS OF A RELIGIOUS BINATIONALIST Joining extensive archival research and a limpid prose, Professor Monty Noam Penkower again displays a definitive mastery of his craft. Eichelberger to Israel’s sovereign renewal, American Jewry’s crusade to save a Jewish state, the effort to create a truce and trusteeship for Palestine, and Judah Magnes’s final attempt to create a federated state there. They include the pivotal 1946 World Zionist Congress, the contributions of Jacob Robinson and Clark M. The chapters in this volume examine a few facets in the drama of how the beleaguered Jewish people, as a phoenix ascending of ancient legend, achieved national self-determination in the reborn State of Israel within three years of the end of World War II and of the Holocaust. They include the Earl Harrison mission and significant report, the effort to keep Europe's borders open to refugee infiltration, the murder of the first Jew in Germany after V-E Day and its impact, and the iconic sculptures of Nathan Rapoport and Poland's landscape of Holocaust memory up to the present day. The chapters in this volume examine a few facets in the drama of how the survivors of the Holocaust contended with life after the darkest night in Jewish history. Saposnik demonstrates how Zionism offers lessons for a politics in which human perfectibility continues to serve as a guiding light and as a counter-narrative to the contemporary politics of self-interest, self-promotion and 'post-truth.' This is a study that bears implications for our understanding of modernity, of space and place, history and historical trajectories, and the place of Jews and Judaism in the modern world. Providing a longue-durée and broad view of the central themes and motivations in the making of Zionism, Saposnik connects its intellectual history with the concrete development of the Zionist project in Israel in its cultural, social, and political history. He provides a new framework for understanding the central ideas of this movement and its relationship to traditional Jewish ideas, Christian thought, and modern secular messianisms. In this volume, Arieh Saposnik examines the complicated relations between nationalism and religious (and non-religious) redemptive traditions through the case study of Zionism. ZIONISM’S REDEMPTIONS: IMAGES OF THE PAST AND VISIONS OF THE FUTURE IN JEWISH NATIONALISM