Notable books of 2011

In addition to our prizewinner, we also want to honor some of the other exceptional books that came to our attention in 2011, each of which is accomplished and provocative.

The headlines in The Jewish Journal and other newspapers serve to confirm the acuity and even the prescience of Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg, who sounds an alarm about the threat to both the democratic values and Jewish character of Israel in his very personal history of his homeland’s past and present, “The Unmaking of Israel” (HarperCollins: $25.99).

“For Israel to establish itself again as a liberal democracy, it must make three changes,” he concludes. “First, it must end the settlement enterprise, end the occupation, and find a peaceful way to partition the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Second, it must divorce state and synagogue. … Third and most basically, it must graduate from being an ethnic movement to being a democratic state in which all citizens enjoy equality.”