The past year has produced a remarkable array of books about October 7 and its aftermath, including Bernard-Henri Levy’s Israel Alone; Victoria Coates’ The Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel – and America – Can Win; Brendan O’Neill’s After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilization; and Daniel Pipes’ Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated.
There are also a trio of books on the American Jewish response to October 7, including Nolan Lebovitz’s The Case for Dual Loyalty: Healing the Divided Soul of American Jews (being published today), Elliot Cosgrove’s For Such a Time as This: Being Jewish Today; and Elliott Abrams’ If You Will It: Rebuilding Jewish Peoplehood for the 21st Century. The titles of these books – with Cosgrove’s biblical reference to Esther, Abrams’ invocation of Herzl’s wisdom, and Lebovitz’s allusion to a historical Jewish fear – indicate the scope of the issues.
George Gilder's seminal book, The Israel Test, has just been published in a new third edition by Encounter Books. It is an extraordinary book of history, philosophy, economics, and other approaches to the contribution of the Jewish state to the world.
We are in the middle of a civilizational war, and these books are essential reading for appreciating the stakes.