GOD IS BACK, about conflicted identities in the twenty-first century, is a provocative book by Avraham “Avrum” Burg, one of the most important and thoughtful public figures in contemporary Israel. Burg criticizes both fundamentalist Islam and Western materialism. This son of one of the founding fathers of religious Zionism indicts his country’s religious establishment as missing a moral conscience, lacking a social agenda and detached from the real problems of Israel and the modern world. He takes his readers on a fascinating journey through Jewish and Zionist history, from Sabbatai Zevi to Herzl, from Freud to Yeshayahu Leibowitz, offering along the way radical and original perceptions about Israel’s international position. He proposes a creative new course that can mend his nation’s relationships with the United States, Europe and the Arab world and can bring Israel to a true peace. 

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GOD IS BACK shows Burg as a writer and thinker of great depth who is able to grasp nuance and complexity, to encounter seemingly intractable issues with freshness and originality, and to entice his readers to think together with him. He is a modern, tolerant, cosmopolitan nationalist, and a person with God in his heart.

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Rights Sold:

France, Fayard; Israel, Yediot Ahronot Publisher

​Reviews:

“I finished reading electrified and full of questions. GOD IS BACK is a personal and philosophical text, accessible to any curious reader thirsty for knowledge. Burg doesn’t preach, doesn’t educate by tugging on his reader’s sleeve. He simply speaks frankly and directly, and he deals with the most fraught aspects living in Israel: questions of belief and doubt, of history and Jewish myth, of the relation to the Holocaust and fears of holocausts to come. I was taken immediately. This is simply an excellent book…Burg writes with spectacularly rich language, but its richness is not a substitute for depth of argument. He is revealed to be a brilliant interpreter of biblical and other texts. He is challenging, he is thought-provoking and displays humility…” – Ariana Melamed, Ynet