Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders’ Dreams?

Written by Daniel Gordis

Narrated by Rob Shapiro

WINNER OF THE RABBI SACKS BOOK PRIZE

A nuanced examination of the Israel’s past, present, and future, after reaching its seventy-fifth anniversary and enduring its most challenging year ever, from the two-time National Jewish Book Award–winning author of Israel. Revised and updated throughout for the paperback edition.

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 a judicial reform crisis, its most dangerous internal rupture ever. Then, with the October 7th War, it was attacked from the outside and plunged into existential uncertainty. In light of those first seventy-five years and the events of 2023 that shook the country to its core, Gordis asks: Has Israel fulfilled the dreams of its founders?

Using Israel’s Declaration of Independence, Gordis measures Israel’s achievements, critiques its failures, and acknowledges its inherent contradictions—ultimately suggesting that, though it has often fallen short, the Jewish state is a success far beyond anything its founders could have imagined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9780063239470

Daniel Gordis

Daniel Gordis is the Koret Distinguished Fellow at Shalem College—Israel’s first liberal arts college—which he helped found in 2007. The author of numerous books on Jewish thought and political currents in Israel, he has twice won the National Jewish Book Award, including the prize for Book of the Year for Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn. Raised and educated in the United States, he has been living in Jerusalem since 1998.

Reviews for Impossible Takes Longer

[Melvyn Mildiner · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An incredibly thoughtful and thought-provoking work that combines evidence and passion.

He had me hooked from the very premise: lay out the country's successes and failures and compare them with the goals of Israel's founders. He uncovers nuances in the Declaration of Independence, asks profound questions, challenges Israel's critics and supporters, and, as summarized by one reviewer, "shows us why hope remains the most realistic assessment of Israel’s future.”

[krishnanfromrgp · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Completely loved it. Starting from Declaration, events leading to it, wars fought, technological developments, community cohesiveness; well enmeshed account of Israel’s journey.