“Raz-Krakotzkin is one of the most creative and iconoclastic Jewish historians of our times. Fittingly, Safed, Zionist Culture, and Jewish History offers a bold new account of the Jewish past that recenters Safed as one of the great sites of Jewish cultural creativity. But Raz-Krakotzkin’s Safed is different from that of Scholem or Schechter. It defies facile dichotomies between tradition and modernity, east and west, and religious and secular. In fact, what Raz-Krakotzkin offers in this book is not only a brilliant new reading of the center of Jewish mysticism in the sixteenth century but a new epistemological lens through which to view history—and particularly Jewish history beyond the grip of a hegemonic Zionist reading.”

David N. Myers, UCLA

“In unearthing the ‘Mishnah consciousness’ of early modern Safed and its scholars, Raz-Krakotzkin offers a unique viewpoint on the Holy Land that brings to light a different meaning of Jewish existence within its borders and allows for shared sovereignty. An erudite and pathbreaking study of the hidden meanings of Eretz-Israel as space and time.” 

Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, New York University

“How can Israel move beyond its present impasse? In this timely book, Raz-Krakotzkin turns to sixteenth-century Safed to rethink the making of Jewish memory and history, and offers alternatives to dominant narratives about Jewish history and Israel/Palestine.”

Sylvie Anne Goldberg, L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris