A Personal History
Other Press, 2025
Publisher’s Description:
Combining poignant memoir and historical research, a son of Holocaust survivors grapples with the dream of Zionism and its consequences.
Israel: A Personal History takes off where Göran Rosenberg’s internationally acclaimed and award-winning childhood memoir, A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz, ends. After his father’s suicide in 1960 in a small industrial town in Sweden, the remainder of the family, a single mother with two children, emigrates to Israel. At first fully absorbed into the world of pioneer Zionism, enchanted by its visions, formed by its ethos, Rosenberg would eventually embark on a journey of discovery among betrayed ideals, buried stories, false promises, and erased villages.
The result is a deeply personal, painstakingly researched, and beautifully written exploration of the contradictory visions that went into the Zionist project, as well as of the ethnic violence, oppression, discrimination, and dispossession caused by its realization. This book is both an exciting history of ideas and the political autobiography of a Jewish European intellectual, a child of dreams and disillusionments, an astute observer of our times.
Reviews:
“[Rosenberg] takes us from his initial sense of the ‘all-captivating promises’ of the Zionist project to a deep disillusionment with it.”
Washington Post
“A profound reckoning.”
Publishers Weekly
“Fearlessly straightforward … a singularly compelling memoir … Rosenberg is not a household name, although he may become one on the strength of this brilliant appraisal of Israel’s political path.”
Manhattan Book Review
“In a powerful account of his growing disenchantment … Rosenberg presents Zionism as a flawed vision with a tragic aspect: Far from being inevitable, the modern state of Israel, as he recounts its history, evolved in brutal policies that belied the utopian hopes on which the new nation had been founded … his retrospection illuminates the present.”
Public Seminar
“Göran Rosenberg’s book Israel is a brilliant combination of an authoritative, reliable, and critical account of the history of Zionism and the State of Israel, and a sensitive, personal, and humane account that examines with equal scrutiny the author’s own deep and complex entanglement in that history. As the son of a Holocaust survivor from Łódź who emigrated to Sweden after the war, Rosenberg was captivated by the idea of Israel and emigrated there in his youth – only to later become disillusioned with that vision and come to understand the destructive foundations upon which the state is built, and the violent future to which it is leading. This English edition of the book, published two years after October 7, 2023, and amidst the brutal genocide in Gaza, stands as a model of honest, critical, and uncompromising self-scrutiny – something we will all be obliged to undertake, in the wake of the genocide in Gaza, regarding Jewish history, Israeli history, and our own personal histories.”
Amos Goldberg, author of Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the Holocaust and coeditor with Bashir Bashir of The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History
About the Author:
Göran Rosenberg was born in 1948 in Sweden, the son of Auschwitz survivors. He is the author of several books, including the highly acclaimed Det förlorade landet (the original Swedish edition of Israel: A Personal History), A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz (Other Press, 2015), and Another Zionism, Another Judaism (Other Press, 2025).
JOB’s Comment:
Also available in German (1998), French (2002) and Polish (2011) translations.
Jan Olof Bengtsson 