
Menachem Begin
The Battle for Israel's Soul
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Narrated by:
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Walter Dixon
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By:
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Daniel Gordis
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. A powerful orator and mesmerizing public figure, Begin was imprisoned by the Soviets in 1940, joined the Free Polish Army in 1942, and arrived in Palestine as a Polish soldier shortly thereafter. Joining the underground paramilitary Irgun in 1943, he achieved instant notoriety for the organization’s bombings of British military installations and other violent acts.
Intentionally left out of the new Israeli government, Begin’s right-leaning Herut political party became a fixture of the opposition to the Labor-dominated governments of Ben-Gurion and his successors, until the surprising parliamentary victory of his political coalition in 1977 made him prime minister. Welcoming Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to Israel and cosigning a peace treaty with him on the White House lawn in 1979, Begin accomplished what his predecessors could not. His outreach to Ethiopian Jews and Vietnamese "boat people" was universally admired, and his decision to bomb Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981 is now regarded as an act of courageous foresight. But the disastrous invasion of Lebanon to end the PLO’s shelling of Israel’s northern cities, combined with his declining health and the death of his wife, led Begin to resign in 1983. He spent the next nine years in virtual seclusion, until his death in 1992. Begin was buried not alongside Israel’s prime ministers, but alongside the Irgun comrades who died in the struggle to create the Jewish national home to which he had devoted his life.
Daniel Gordis’ perceptive biography gives us new insight into a remarkable political figure whose influence continues to be felt both within Israel and throughout the world.
©2014 Daniel Gordis (P)2014 Gildan Media LLCListeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
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The reader takes it much too fast (but not so fast that slowing it down is much help. Worse, he has taken no trouble to learn Hebrew pronunciation. His constant mistakes are annoying and make this otherwise enjoyable book a harder listen.
Good content, meh performance
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An inspiring and surprising story
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Where does Menachem Begin rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
The book's great. Daniel Gordis' writing is, as ever, captivating and illuminating. But I'm returning this audiobook and moving to an eBook to read the rest of the book. I simply can't take any more of the narrator.How did the narrator detract from the book?
Sadly he's unfamiliar with the Hebrew names and words that pepper the book.The early chapters make frequent references to Menachem Begin's father Ze'ev. The narrator calls him "zay ev" (pronounced as if the first half of the name rhymes with the greeting "Hi").
That was grating enough but the final straw was when, in chapter 4 (at around the 11min mark), he refers to the "Hativka". It should be the "Hatikva". At that point I realised I was more focused on waiting for the next foul-up by the narrator than by the content of the book.
Narrator mispronounces almost every Hebrew word
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A great book
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Inspiring story
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What made the experience of listening to Menachem Begin the most enjoyable?
The underlying story ofMenachem Begin's comittment to Israel and the Jewish PeopleHow could the performance have been better?
The orator could have taken the time to better prepare himself to correctly pronounce a variety of mispronounced words in Hebrew and Yiddish, it was distracting listening to him slaughter these words.Great story lousy oration
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Amazing!
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Awesome book!
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Excellent
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Great book.
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