The Hebrew word korban has many connotations, ranging from “sacrifice” to “victim,” and these lexical ambiguities are a point of departure for Yael Feldman in Glory and Agony: Isaac's Sacrifice and National Narrative, where she examines fluctuating attitudes toward the ‘akedah in modern Hebrew culture. Although Genesis 22 depicts the binding of Isaac as a near sacrifice, a sacrifice not enacted, in the context of modern Jewish nationalism Isaac has been recast and reimagined variously: as passive victim, martyr, self-sacrificing hero defending the national cause, and angry rebel raging against a filicidal older generation.

Feldman has undertaken an ambitious project and set herself multiple goals, one of which is to ask: how and when did Isaac turn into a widespread secular metaphor for militarism and violent death? She finds answers through an examination of the myriad ways in which Zionism as a cultural enterprise has drawn on previous traditions and myriad sources. Not only have modern Hebrew writers been inspired by biblical texts, but they have also delved into postbiblical texts, and some authors were well aware of medieval martyrology, Christian understandings of Isaac as a prefiguration of Jesus, and Freudian concepts. While in the early twentieth century the notion of kiddush ha-shem (martyrdom) held sway over the Hebrew imagination, glorification of military heroism did not come into vogue until World War I, with the formation of the Jewish Legion (the elation of whose volunteers came to be known, in Berl Katznelson's phrase, as 'osher ‘akedah—the joy of sacrifice). Though that sense of joy apparently diminished after the war, Jewish writers continued to invoke the image of the crucified Jesus to endorse an ideal of willing self-sacrifice. Later, during World War II and Israel's War of Independence, growing attention focused on Abraham and his role in the story of Isaac. In an era of terrible and awesome expectations – expectations that the younger generation would need to fight and face extreme risks for the very survival of the Jewish people – fathers bore terrible and terrifying responsibilities toward the younger generation. Feldman quotes a kibbutz Passover Haggadah from 1949 that suggests both the verve and anguish with which Isaac was reinvented as a military hero during this epoch: “And the great hour has come for the people of Israel—the hour of the war of liberation, full of heroism and blood, the bliss/glory of aqedah and the agony of sacrifice and above all hope sings of redemption and revival for the dispersed of Israel” (145–46, Feldman's emphasis). Increasingly, after those difficult years and with each passing war, Israeli literature and public discourse came to express more agony than glory. Laying out this trajectory, Feldman explores the religious myths and psychoanalytic tensions that underlie and shape evolving political positions toward the notion of “noble deaths,” the need for the young to fight and sacrifice themselves for the collective good.

Yet another of this book's goals is to revise understandings of periodization and generational divisions in modern Hebrew literature. The conventional wisdom is that after 1973 an era of disillusionment with Zionism led to more frequent and ever more critical attacks on nationalist discourse. Feldman argues that such objections started much earlier; she claims that from its inception Israel as a nation had wrestled with the ideal of sacrifice and contested it. Israeli writers, for example, often cast the practice of putting young people into harm's way as evil—albeit sometimes a necessary evil. To make her case and challenge the usual chronology, Feldman devotes considerable care to detective work, uncovering numerous texts that address these issues, including little-known texts by such literary giants as Amos Oz and Moshe Shamir. She concludes that, while some trends have predominated in retellings of the ‘akedah, no ideology has been monolithic, and it is not easy to divide attitudes into distinct historical periods. Israelis have always been struggling with these issues, and individuals too have wrestled with them over the course of their lives, trying to make their peace with the sacrifices demanded of them and frequently changing their own stance in the process. Keep in mind too that some of these people have varied their roles, identifying at some points in their lives as Isaac and at others as Abraham.

One more feature of this study is its attention to gender. While the ‘akedah is expressly a story of intergenerational tensions between fathers and sons, Glory and Agony often compares the stories of Isaac to tales of female sacrifice, such as Jephtha's daughter. Feldman also points out how a number of women writers have developed new responses to and reworkings of the ‘akedah from a female perspective. Netiva Ben Yehuda's Palmach Trilogy recounts her experiences as a woman among the Isaacs who fought for Israel's independence. Orly Castel-Bloom's mock ‘akedah in her novel Dolly City fiercely parodies and condemns violent sacrifice of a child's well-being for nationalist ideals, but this work introduces the mother, not the father, as the monstrous parent who, out of her own anxious motives and twisted self-understandings, instigates crimes against her son in the name of patriotism and love. Another notable writer, Amalia Kahana-Carmon, takes references to the ‘akedah in a distinctly feminist direction; in her fiction, female characters too become Isaacs as they face oppression by and subordination to dominating male figures.

Feldman ranges over an abundance of literary material. She discusses writing by Yiẓḥak Lamdan, S. Yizhar, Yigal Mossinsohn, Amir Gilboa, Nathan Alterman, Hanoch Levin, Shulamit Hareven, Avraham B. Yehoshua, Anton Shammas, David Grossman, and many others. She also visits the visual arts, bringing in some highly evocative illustrations to enhance her commentary on the cultural milieu. (As massively detailed and comprehensive as this book is, I confess I was hungry for more explication of the visual arts, precisely because her examples are so compelling. What, for example, was Menashe Kadishman thinking when he designed that peculiarly disturbing sculpture of the ‘akedah?)

The ideal reader of this work is someone familiar with all these cultural figures and with extensive recall of their texts and artwork. Yet Feldman's book does not present itself as a monograph for specialists. Indeed, the title does not explicitly mention Hebrew literature, Zionism, or Israel. The book aims for a larger framework, and the introduction situates this study within recent scholarly debate on the history of sacrificial violence. Feldman highlights her fascination with a variety of figures who are emblems of violent martyrdom and noble death, including Jephtha's daughter, Jesus, Ishmael, and Iphigenia. Also figuring importantly in her discussions are Oedipus, Laius, and psychoanalytic theory, and it should be noted that this work has already attracted a readership among scholars in biblical and postbiblical studies.

One of the book's strengths is that it helps demonstrate the significance of modern Hebrew culture to a wider audience. Israel and the Yishuv appear here as a laboratory of cross-cultural encounter that brings together the Jewish literary heritage with a range of modern intellectual trends, putting them in conversation with one another in intimate and dramatic ways. Far from being a small and belated literary flowering, the tail end of a grand Hebraic tradition, the modern Hebrew corpus becomes a crucible for working through the agonies of the big questions—psychological, political, and ethical—surrounding the idea of sacrifice. These modern texts ask us to rethink the nobility of sacrifice, creating a particular intensity in modern Hebrew: because its language is so close to that of the Bible, because the intertextual relations are so dynamic, and because the issues hit home in such a personal way for Israelis. As Feldman notes, “questions of violence, whether in the name of the Almighty or later secular ‘gods,’ are commonplace in a country where the trauma of war and terrorism is never distant, and where the memory of the Holocaust still looms large” (16). In a small country like Israel such issues often feel not only familiar, but indeed like family matters, well suited to expression through reworkings of the ‘akedah story, itself a tale of intergenerational tensions, family conflicts, choices, aggression, and blame. Sadly, too, as this book notes, in a post 9/11 world of suicide bombings, widespread religious fanaticism, and glamorized martyrdom, sacrificial violence has become a defining issue of our times, on a global scale. Although it remains to be seen how art and writing across the world will struggle with these issues, in Israel and in Hebrew literature the debates have long been underway.