Michael Stanislawski

A surprisingly succinct summary of the ideology's ideological sources, growth, and divisions. Unlike a lot of these Very Short Introduction's, the author has written a tight and easy-to-follow overview of a complicated subject. A must-read given world events. Needless to say, Zionism has changed a lot since Auto-Emancipation and Herzl—makes you wonder what those early guards would think of the country today.

Most interesting fact I learned: Herzl's congresses naturally had a Babel-like mix of languages and they eventually settled into a "Kongressdeutsch"—a mix of unadorned German and Yiddish. Delightful.… (meer)