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Sara Yael Hirschhorn, City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017). Pp. 368. $39.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780674975057
City on a Hilltop isolates the phenomenon of disproportionate American participation in the Israeli settler movement, providing a perspective on Israeli settlement that crosscuts many of its internal factions and debates. According to author Sara Yael Hirschhorn, Americans comprise some 15 percent of settlers in the West Bank (notably excluding East Jerusalem). The premise of her book is that they brought with them a uniquely American liberal ideology, informed by a history of struggle for civil rights along with a high bar of suburban comfort and luxury. But the importance of City on a Hilltop may be found less in the argument about American liberalism than in the broader picture Hirschhorn paints of the post-1967 settler movement, one that found its legs in the seemingly unlikely combination of divine promise and suburban real estate. The text's detailed oral histories, focused heavily on the settlers’ ideological formation, challenge monolithic understandings of the movement as settlers ruminate upon and often reject various strands of settlement ideology and their place within it.
The core of City on a Hill focuses on what might be understood as some of the more “moderate,” suburban Israeli settlements. Rather than plot a linear historiography, Hirschhorn dedicates a chapter each to Yamit, Efrat, and Tekoa, whose histories are largely told in the voices of the settlements’ founders and earliest residents. Although the chapters are organized roughly chronologically, the histories of these settlements overlap, echoing one another even as they diverge according to their leaders’ commitments to varying levels of religious practice, bourgeois sensibilities, and cooperation with (or dependence on) the state. But these liberal, professedly nonviolent settlers are...