Summary

Coates continues recalling his travels abroad. From Susya, he traveled to Tel Aviv. He was struck by the beauty and energy of the place. His first night there, he sat at a café, studied his surroundings, and stewed over everything he had seen in the past days. He reflected on “the Zionist corpus” and its overt parallels to American history (177).

Coates goes on to describe Golda Meir’s era of power in Israel. She held that a people’s worth was “defined by their possession of a homeland” (178). Leon Uris’s 1958 novel The Exodus authenticates this notion. In this text and throughout the 1960s, Israeli forces were represented as honorable, even when committing violence. In the subsequent years, thinkers and committees also noted how Israeli Jews were changing spiritually and physically. More and more Jews had lighter eyes and fairer complexions, while...