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Israel's critics in the West insist that no country founded on a single religion or culture can stay democratic and prosperous - but they're wrong. In The Promise of Israel, Daniel Gordis points out that Israel has defied that conventional wisdom. It has provided its citizens infinitely greater liberty and prosperity than anyone expected, faring far better than any other young nation. Israel's "magic" is a unique blend of democracy and tradition, of unabashed particularism coupled to intellectual and cultural openness.

Israel is a tiny state, and yet it has captured the world's attention, aroused its imagination, and, lately, been the object of its opprobrium. Why does such a small country speak to so many global concerns? More pressingly: Why does Israel make the decisions it does? And what lies in its future? We cannot answer these questions until we understand Israel's people and the questions and conflicts, the hopes and desires, that have animated their conversations and actions.

When Daniel Gordis, his wife, Elisheva, and their three young children abandoned a safe and comfortable home in Los Angeles to move halfway around the world and find a new life in Israel, the future looked bright. It was 1998, Ehud Barak had just been elected prime minister, and peace appeared to be only a few tough negotiations away. Two years later, hope had turned to terror, as the rattle of machine-gun fire perforated the night and the frightened, exhausted children clung desperately to their stuffed animals in fitful sleep.

Reviled as a fascist by his great rival Ben-Gurion, venerated by Israel’s underclass, the first Israeli to win the Nobel Peace Prize, a proud Jew but not a conventionally religious one, Menachem Begin was both complex and controversial. Born in Poland in 1913, Begin was a youthful admirer of the Revisionist Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky and soon became a leader within Jabotinsky’s Betar movement.

Relations between the American Jewish community and Israel are at an all-time nadir. Since Israel’s founding 70 years ago, particularly as memory of the Holocaust and of Israel’s early vulnerability has receded, the divide has grown only wider. Most explanations pin the blame on Israel’s handling of its conflict with the Palestinians, Israel’s attitude toward non-Orthodox Judaism, and Israel’s dismissive attitude toward American Jews in general. In short, the cause for the rupture is not what Israel is; it’s what Israel does.

In 1948, Israel’s founders sought a “national home for the Jewish people,” where Jewish life would be transformed. The state they ultimately made, says Daniel Gordis, is a place of extraordinary success and maddening disappointment, a story of both unprecedented human triumph and great suffering. When it marked its seventy-fifth anniversary, Israel was in the throes of its most dangerous internal rupture ever. Then it was attacked from the outside and plunged into existential uncertainty.