Korn shows that Jews have always thought of salvation as corporate, not individual, for Torah's famous call to God's people to be holy in Leviticus 19 is in the plural imperative. Since holiness is to be social, primarily expressed in relations among human beings and especially in a holy society, a land is needed to ensure the freedom to create that society. This is why "the Land is essential to the divine biblical mission" (8).

For most of Christian history, however, the churches have taught that God is no longer interested in either the Jews as a people, or the land of Israel. This is what scholars call "supercessionism," which means the belief that the church has superceded physical Israel and its people, and that God no longer has a covenant with the Jews.

It was only after the Holocaust that most Christians started to reconsider Paul's emphatic declaration in Romans 11 that God has not "rejected his people" and or their "calling" (1-2, 29). Other Christians have noted that while the Old Testament prophets enlarged the covenant to include the whole world, they also promised that exiled Jews would be returned to the land. They saw the particular covenant with a particular people expanded to include the Gentiles, but without displacing God's promises to the Jews. Korn notes that most Christian denominations have now acknowledged God's continuing covenant with the Jews. But he doesn't mention, perhaps because it is so painful, that many Christians still think the land of Israel has no theological importance for anyone-Jews or Gentiles.

If for no other reason, this book is valuable because of its snapshots of critical moments in Jewish history, from the call of Abraham seventeen centuries before Christ to modern Israel and its current conflict with the Palestinians.

Readers will see why Jews are suspicious of Christian religious overtures-because they have often been coercive and sometimes murderous. For example, in the 13th century Pope Innocent III ordered that Jews in Catholic lands wear distinctive clothing and not appear in public between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Some Italian cities were requiring that Jews wear a yellow star of David even into the 18th century. Thousands of German Jews were massacred in the first crusade, and thousands more were butchered after being accused of causing the bubonic plague by poisoning wells.

Throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern period European Jews were called "Christ-killers" and often confined to ghettoes and prevented from entering certain occupations. Some of the worst attacks on Jews were in Russia, where Nicholas I in 1825 ordered Jewish boys to be drafted at the age of twelve for compulsory service of thirty years. This often meant death or forced conversion. The pogrom of 1881 resulted in the murder of thousands of Jews.

The Holocaust is well-known, but readers will learn little-known facts that continue to shock. Rabbi Korn tells of the ship St. Louis that carried 930 Jews released by Hitler in 1939. Even though most had quota papers permitting them to stay temporarily in both America and Cuba, neither country permitted them to land. The ship eventually sailed back to England and Belgium, where many disembarked-but only to be rounded up by Nazis when that little country was overrun, and sent to their deaths in concentration camps.

At the height of the Holocaust, which murdered two-thirds of Europe's nine million Jews, the Nazis offered to trade 100,000 Jews to England for food and goods. But the British Secretary for the Near East, Lord Moyne, refused the trade, asking, "What would I do with the Jews?" Even after the war, from 1945 to 1947 when European Jews were fighting to emigrate to British-controlled Israel, Britain refused to increase Israel's immigration quotas. British ships intercepted 51,000 Jewish refugees and put them behind barbed-wire in Cyprus-because they "were fearful of offending oil-rich Arab countries by allowing further Jewish immigration" (86).

If this book is a handy guide to biblical and Jewish history, it also presents rarely-known facts about the current Arab-Israeli conflict. Korn explains that while Arabs have repeatedly rejected a two state solution (1937's Peel Commission; the 1947 UN partition plan; the 2000 offer by Barak to Arafat), Israel has repeatedly given up land for peace. As a result of the 1978 Camp David agreement, Israel gave back oil-rich Sinai to Egypt, and in 2005 returned Gaza to the Palestinians.

In 2000 Ehud Barak accepted Bill Clinton's proposal that "Israel would withdraw from all of Gaza and 95 percent of the West Bank, give the Palestinians an additional 2 percent of land from Israel, accept a Palestinian state in contiguous West Bank territory, recognize a district in East Jerusalem as the capital of the new Palestinian state, dismantle Israeli settlements, and relocate Israeli settlers" (137).

Arafat rejected Clinton's proposal, made no counteroffer, and launched a violent intifada that murdered more than 1000 Israelis. Korn cites a Boston Globe report that during that intifada 18 percent of the Palestinians killed in the crossfire were noncombatants, but 80 percent of the Israelis killed were innocent civilians. This is an illustration of what he calls the "moral difference" between the two sides-while Israeli military policy targets terrorists and instructs its troops to try to avoid harming noncombatants, Palestinian fighters deliberately target civilians.

But Korn does not demonize the Palestinians. He laments that they "are suffering terribly" (145), and proposes that the real battle is not between Jews and Muslims, or even Israelis and Palestinians, but "between extremists of all faiths who hate diversity and difference, and moderates with [the prophet] Micah's pluralistic dream" (156). Israel, he says, represents the principle of pluralism in the Middle East, for it boasts the only real democracy in the Middle East outside Turkey-and perhaps the fragile one emerging in Iraq-and it promises religious freedom to a multiplicity of faiths.

While Korn discusses these unavoidable political problems, his main focus is on faith and theology, to help Christians understand the religious thinking of Jews. In that he is eminently successful. But he misses some important distinctions when he describes attitudes of Christians toward Jews and Israel. The most significant is that between conservative and liberal Christians in the modern era.

Generally, Protestant conservatives have been far more conscious than liberals of the ongoing importance of Jews and their return to the land. Evangelical William Hechler was Theodor Herzl's (founder of Zionism) most constant follower and helped Herzl formulate his vision for a Jewish state. The Puritans and Jonathan Edwards, evangelicalism's greatest mind, resisted deist charges that Judaism was unspiritual and unnecessary by arguing for one covenant binding Jews and Christians and predicting that a future Jewish return to Israel would fulfill biblical prophecies.

UNC historian Yaakov Ariel has argued that fundamentalists have been almost alone in the history of Christianity to assign so much importance to Jews and their return to the land. Canadian historian Paul Merkley reports that in the quarter-century that led to the creation of modern Israel in 1947-48 "the sturdiest champions of the restoration of the Jews to Israel were the Evangelicals and fundamentalists."

According to Merkley, since the 1967 six-day war mainline Protestants in the West and the churches of the East have treated Israel with resentment and hostility, and Roman Catholics have failed to affirm any relation of the land and state of Israel to the Jewish covenant. But fundamentalists and evangelicals have generally welcomed the state of Israel as a sign that God's covenant with the Jews is ongoing. I would add that while some fundamentalists prize Israel simply for its connection to end-time prophecy, most evangelicals and fundamentalists admire Israel because its very existence seems a fulfillment of covenant promises. In other words, when they meet Jews and dream of going to Israel, they think of Jesus' connection to the land and its people, not how Jews will bring about the end of the world. Most don't even believe in that end-time connection.

But there is a profound connection between Judaism and Christianity, and Israel is at the heart of it. This book is a marvelous introduction to that connection.

---Gerald R. McDermott is Jordan-Trexler Professor of Religion at Roanoke College, Roanoke, VA.