The Empty Wagon: Zionism's journey from identity crisis to identity theft Hardcover

A definitive study of the ideology and motivations behind Zionism, tracing the movement back to the driving obsessions of its founding fathers, its intellectual origins (including Christian Zionism, ethnic nationalism, German Romanticism, Russian workers' movements, and more), tracing its ideological evolution throughout the past century, and the manifestation of its ideology in the behavior of the state of Israel today. Rabbi Shapiro uncovers the compulsion the architects of Zionism had to transform the values of the Jewish people from spiritual to material, by transforming Jewish identity from religious to political. He describes the tactics the Zionists used to hijack Jewish identity and cast the Zionist movement - and later the state of Israel - as the center of world Jewry and the representatives of Jewish values. Rabbi Shapiro begins with the traditional concepts of Judaism, Jewishness, and Jewish peoplehood as understood pre-Zionism; and then describes the intrusion into Jewish identity by the Zionist movement, and its effects on Jewish consciousness today. He traces today's Zionist behavior back to the original founding principles of Zionism as espoused by Pinsker, Herzl, Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion, Asher Ginsberg and others, and how each one's ideas of how to replace Judaism with Zionism manifests in the different political parties in Israel today. Finally, an in depth historical and ideological study is provided of the refusal of Orthodox Jewry to surrender their Jewish identity to Zionism and the largely unknown battle, waged between Zionists and traditional Orthodox Jews for the shaping of Jewish identity and values today.