JRV1305

Among Grassroots American Jews’ New Year’s Resolutions: Read an Inspiring Israel Book

#1305 January 18, 2026

All of us grassroots American Jews should heed President Trump’s counsel to us in the Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration’s shootings to “be proud of who you are.”  Resolve to reinvigorate that feeling this year by reading a stirring gripping Israel book.  Out of my thousand, I recommend one of those below on the Aliyah Bet.

A reader responded this week to my New Year’s Resolution to heed President Trump’s counsel to us to “be proud of who you are” by continuing these weekly emails aimed at “broadening and deepening we grassroots American Jews’ support of our people’s homeland of Israel.” The reader suggested that I regularly reference herein Israel’s mankind-benefiting breakthroughs in high tech, medicine, agriculture, etc.  He’s got a point.  Google “Good News Israel,” where you’ll find sites and newsletters comprehensively detailing these wonders, justifying your pride.

But an eccentricity of mine affords me an opportunity to offer another, alas, neglected, source of pride in our homeland and peoplehood.  Over my eighty-five and eleven-twelfths years, I haven’t collected stamps or coins like normal folks.  By haunting “used” book stores and Jewish neighborhood library book sales, the parrot and I have collected over a thousand non-fiction books about Israel, ancient and modern, of which I’ve read a measurable fraction (the parrot hasn’t read any, he just recycles pages of those he gets ahold of). 

Talk about “roots,” there’s history and biblical archeology here with still-standing stone, including the Temple Mount, testifying the land of Israel is historically, legally, equitably, indispensably ours. Among today’s Israel books are gripping, inspiring accounts, often first-person, of tenacity and courage in building and protecting the homeland, ingathering exiles and more.    

I’ve got a dozen categories of these books on my website:

> Grassroots American Jewish Street
> Israel for Us Grassroots
> Gripping Books on Our People’s Homeland of Israel

My categories are Archeology, Continuous Homeland Presence, Zionism, Aliyah Bet, Versus the British, War of Independence, Americans for Israel 1948, Six Day War, Yom Kippur War, Alternatives to Two-States, American Jews, Anti-Israel Media Bias

I included last week in my suggested New Years Resolutions for you, this year read one of these books.  You can get them on Amazon or AbeBooks.com.

From the standpoint of gripping inspiring reading, my category I commend to you especially is “Aliyah Bet.”  We look back on Jews’ experience in Europe as centuries of mistreatment – Pale of Settlement, ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, forced relocation, pogrom – of Jews living there, but this was coupled with repeated prohibitions against “transport of Jews to the East,” culminating in Mandate Trustee Britain’s before-during-and-after-the-Holocaust anti-Jewish Palestine blockade.  Aliyah Bet was Palestinian Jews’ most effectively after the Holocaust plucking Hitler’s survivors from DP camps in Europe, packing them onto often barely seaworthy ships and defiantly sailing them into the teeth of the British blockade.  The first-person account books on this, featuring too the role of Jewish US WW II vet volunteers and hardship, determination and courage of survivors themselves, are exceptionally inspiring volumes.

Here’s my take on them.

The most famous of Aliyah Bet ships was of course Exodus 1947, which British foreign minister Bevin unintentionally immortalized by boarding and seizing it in a battle on the high seas off Palestine’s coast, then returning the refugees to France and then Germany itself, garnering for them the public support of the Western world.

Ruth Gruber’s Destination Palestine, expanded a half-century later in Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation, is grippingly moving.  She covered international efforts to deal with the Jewish refugees before originally-named President Warfield’s sailing, was there on the pier at Haifa when the British brought the smashed Exodus in and loaded the refugees into the prison ships, and was there on the shore, and once in one of the prison ships, when they were returned to France, where they refused to get off and France wouldn’t make them.

But by me the two most moving Exodus books, delving deeply into the experiences of the crew and passengers themselves, are Gordon Thomas’ Operation Exodus and Nissan Degani’s Exodus Calling, much of the latter particularly in the participants’ own words.  And grippingly zeroing in on commander Harel’s perspective is acclaimed Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk’s Commander of the Exodus.  Rev. John Stanley Grauel was a key member of Exodus’ crew, and his battle broadcasts and interviews, recounted in his auto-bio Grauel, inflamed the world.  A successive period-capturing history of the ship itself is David Holly’s Exodus 1947. 

The tale of the ten U.S.-sourced Aliyah Bet ships and that of the U.S. vet volunteers is movingly captured in Greenfield [a crew member] and Hochstein’s The Jews’ Secret Fleet.  Among my favorite all-time reads is Lova Eliav’s Voyage of the Ulua, and not far behind Captain Rudolph Patzert’s Running the Palestine Blockade.

If, like me, you’re a wild-eyed grassroots Jewish American Zionist, reading one of these Aliyah Bet books this year will give you a B-12 shot.  If you’re not quite there, it’ll stimulate your adherence to President Trump’s recommendation “Be proud of who you are.”