Oddly enough, I bought a copy of Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back at a centennial birthday celebration for the author where author Scott Turow was a keynote speaker. Having read 7 or 8 of Bellow's fictional works over many years & in the midst of planning a trip to Israel & the Palestinian Territories, this book seemed a nice travel accessory, even though written 4o years ago. And while there are some interesting personal reflections on Israel and detailed encounters with a variety of Israeli...

Uauh.... what a writer... Just a small mouthpiece: "Should communism sweep Italy, would the Pope move to Jerusalem? Rather, says one of the prelates, he would stay in Rome and become Party Secretary. And there we are, Kissinger has entirely wrecked Russia's Middle East policy and the Pope is about to swap the Vatican for Kremlim. Dessert is served."

Well known , Nobel prize winning author , put his pen to the service of recording his 1975 visit to the Land of Israel and his thoughts on the dillemas faced by Israel at the time , and on world politics at large in the mid 1970's.The author puts down his observations , from his thoughts about Hassidim on a plane from Heathrow to Ben Gurion airport to a secular kibbutz near Ceasarea, and his meetings with leaders and thinkers in Israel such as former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban , Jerusale...

Read this over the weekend in, appropriately, Jerusalem. Bellow would seem to have some advantage over the minions who have put together their thoughts on ancient ruins, futility of religious hatred, the mystery of the Orient, etc. - after all, he speaks Yiddish (though apparently not much Hebrew), has covered the Six-Day War (for Newsday), has some local friends and family, and receives the red carpet from legendary Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, meeting Amos Oz, Abba Eban, Yitzhak Rabin, etc. (...

A political travel book that is somehow both incredibly outdated and currently modern and relevant at the same time. (Which is super depressing actually. The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh?)And while I liked Saul Bellow's writing here (I'm not familiar with his other work), and his take on politics (he has a way with descriptions), I was surprised that this skinny little book with cramped typeface won the 1976 Nobel Prize for Literature. I enjoyed it a lot, and flagged and h...

About 1/4 of the way through, this one goes DNF. Virtually nothing about interactions with ordinary Israelis, instead political rants referencing dated politicians such as Kissinger.

Idiosyncratic, impressionistic, informed, and entertaining account of Bellow's extended 1975 trip to Israel. It's shocking and disheartening to what extent the troublesome Arab-Israeli dynamics remain the same today; seemingly, 35 years have passed with only extra deaths to show for them. (OK, the Soviet Union fell. That was good.) One Israeli spoke to Bellow about the importance of American oil independence to successfully resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict--gee, we sure made a lot of p...

free palestine forever and always

This was a travel guide that did not rely so much on evocation and the world that the writer observes so much as it read like a diary. It was more reliant on personal discussions and a political state so outdated that it now reads more like a faerie story than history based on the current set of circumstances in the Israel/Palestine debate. I don't know, indeed, if there is a place for assimilated Jews to speak so much on the debate- it's personally my least favourite thing that people ask me ju...

Bellow captures a debate framed by nationalism and holocaust. Do multiculturalism and anti-racism alter that debate?

Bellow's account of his time in Jerusalem and the evolution of his thinking about the conflict there functions on several levels.The narrative is threaded with a critical survey of thinking and writing on the conflict between Israel and its neighbors. As he interacts with the life of the state, Bellow summarizes, converses with or comments on Chomsky, Sartre, Kissinger, and an impressive array of scholars. He does assert his opinion, but he seems to do so with integrity, granting points to those...

This is a book of assorted ramblings of Bellow's extended visit to Istael in 1976. Bellow has no connection to Israel or its politics other than being an assimilated Jew. But as a Nobel Laureate, he has many literary and political friends and aquaintances in high places who offer him their often conflicting views. Many of them are Western intellectuals, leftists and socialists. It is amazing in the hindsight of after more than 40 years after this book was written how wrong these views and opinio...

This was a huge disappointment. I picked up this book in an old-fashioned Santa Fe bookstore just reading Saul Bellow's name as an author and of course, the title suggesting its subject. In stead of a thorough, impartial yet personal view of the middle-eastern problem coming from a Nobel Prize winning author who also happens to be Jewish, the book is oddly incoherent jumble of incidents and perspectives. There are couple of beautiful paragraphs - one talking about sense of History and other desc...

This book was written in 1976 while Bellow was visiting Jerusalem and interviewed and talked to intellectuals, politicians, jews, arabs and people he met there. However it is more than ever relevant and very interesting to understand what's in stake when talking on the israel-palestinian conflict, its challenges and solutions.

Very little has changed in Mid-East relationships during the 35 years since this book's been written, which is what made it interesting.

An interesting account (particularly in the posterity of modernity) of Bellow's experiences in Jerusalem, punctuated with his own and others' views of the interposed Judaist and Arabic relations following the Second World War.Like many of his other books, it feels at times like ADHD gone mad. Additionally, some of his views and comments have aged poorly in light of temporal progress, yet the aggregate picture of the book remains as that which depicts a race, who, in Bellow's own words, faced "ex...

Got this from the audible plus library. I've never actually read anything by Bellow but I've known of him for quit a long time because of his conservative readers. My only critique of this book is that it is very much specific to one period in time. It was a little like reading one of the thousands of political books that are produced every week that are irrelevant in a month. However, the subject was israel so it definitely had more relevance and felt like reading someone's travel memoirs of co...

The book is both depressing and inspiring, since I share most of the thoughts (and) prejudices) about Israel and the Middle East with Mr. Bellow. The general tone might be a bit conservative, but all kind of voices are heard. Perhaps the book lacks an Arab point of view, but then again this seems to be a deeply personal journey, so Bellow's choices have to be accepted.

Beautifully written (of course) and surprisingly informative book - part travelogue, part reportage on the Israeli Palestinian issue. Reading it is to see how little has changed - for a part of the left, Israel is colonialist and imperialist and thus to be resisted. Also, it provided a fascinating glimpse into the people of power and academia and politics that Bellow frequently interacted with.

I had no idea Saul Bellow was a warm Jew who cherished Israel until reading this book. He tells about his visit, meetings and impressions. Very interesting.

Not much has changed in the Middle East since 76

No real reason to read this unless you are finishing up going through Bellow's works.

There are probably more informative books on Israel and the Middle East but none written with the style and insight Bellow can produce.

A powerful and insightful personal account by literary luminary Saul Bellow. Many of his key insights still stand some 45 years later.

Racist and opinionated.

So little has changed.

Counting the blessings in Covid era, I found and am reading the second book from Bellow. His sharp tongue/ pen is so Bellow!

"Laqueur thought it would be realistic for Israel to tell the world that it had no intentions of annexing Arab territories, that it was prepared to conform with U.N. Resolution 242, which emphasizes 'the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.' Laqueur suggests that Israel declare itself willing to evacuate the territories by stages 'over a period of five to ten years within the framework of a general peace settlement of the 1967 borders in the interest of security.'" (page 230)....

This is an odd and somewhat disjointed little title, as much a travelogue of Jewish-American author Saul Bellow's 1975 visit to Israel as a literature review of what other thinkers have had to say about that nation and the global status of contemporary Judaism. Together with his own observations and reflections, the writer also includes excerpts of his conversations with prominent Jews like Yitzhak Rabin, Amos Oz, and Henry Kissinger. Forty-five years on, the resulting text is a definite time ca...

A fascinating account of a visit to Jerusalem in 1975. I love reading books where the future is unknown to the writer but known to the reader. Written 45 years ago, the big issues were the rising power of the Soviet Union, the decline of the USA and the West, the rise of Arab Marxism and the fragility of Israel. The Soviet Union is long gone, we still harp on about the decline of the West - although it has been holding on for a long time now - Islamism rather than Marxism is the problem now, and...