Glory and Agony Isaac's Sacrifice and National Narrative [Hardcover]

Glory and Agonyis the first history of the shifting attitudes toward national sacrifice in Hebrew culture over the last century. Its point of departure is Zionism's obsessive preoccupation with its haunting primal scene of sacrifice, the near-sacrifice of Isaac, as evidenced in wide-ranging sources from the domains of literature, art, psychology, philosophy, and politics. By placing these sources in conversation with twentieth-century thinking on human sacrifice, violence, and martyrdom, this study draws a complex picture that provides multiple, sometimes contradictory insights into the genesis and gender of national sacrifice.

Extending back over two millennia, this study unearths retellings of biblical and classical narratives of sacrifice, both enacted and aborted, voluntary and violent, male and femaleIsaac, Ishmael, Jephthah's daughter, Iphigenia, Jesus.Glory and Agonytraces the birth of national sacrifice out of the ruins of religious martyrdom, exposing the sacred underside of Western secularism in Israel as elsewhere.

Feldman's first-rate interdisciplinary study demonstrates not only how modern ideologies produce re-readings and rewritings of ancient myth but also how ancient myths weight and reshape these very ideologies. A must read for any reader interested in Hebrew culture and the psyche of modern Israel, and an insightful read for inquisitive readers at large. Yael Feldman'sGlory and Agony: Isaac's Sacrifice and National Narrativeis an enthralling engagement with one of humanity's most ancient and consequential tropes . . . Though there have been numerous studies of the ever-evolving and sometimes oppressive nature of this myth, none has come close to providing the kind of brave interdisciplinary acumen Feldman's scholarship delivers . . .Glory and Agonyis a work of forceful originality yet always meticulously researched, containing illustrative, provocative epigraphs as well as nearly ninety pages of informlS(