This original and thought-provoking study offers a fresh perspective on Zionism by exploring Hebrew culture’s ambivalent attitude toward modern sports. Drawing on extensive archival sources and contemporary literary theories, it focuses on Zionism’s surprising anxiety toward sports during the interwar heyday of “muscular Judaism,” revealing an unusual society in which athletes failed to attain national pride and distinction. Addressing themes such as the body, language, space, immigration, internationalism, amateurism, gender, and militarization, Embodying the Revolution presents an innovative reading of Jewish life in Mandate Palestine, linking the marginalization of sports to the meaning and experience of the Zionist Revolution. Idels' compelling interpretation of the appeal of sports, selfhood, and the compromises inherent in radical aspirations—narrated from the periphery of the interwar global rise of sports—challenges contemporary assumptions that dismiss ideology as an elitist myth.

Offering a new perspective on Zionism, Exiled in the Homeland draws on memoirs, newspaper accounts, and archival material to examine closely the lives of the men and women who immigrated to Palestine in the early twentieth century. Rather than reducing these historic settlements to a single, unified theme, Donna Robinson Divine's research reveals an extraordinary spectrum of motivations and experiences among these populations.

Though British rule and the yearning for a Jewish national home contributed to a foundation of solidarity, Exiled in the Homeland presents the many ways in which the message of emigration settled into the consciousness of the settlers. Considering the benefits and costs of their Zionist commitments, Divine explores a variety of motivations and outcomes, ranging from those newly arrived immigrants who harnessed their ambition for the goal of radical transformation to those who simply dreamed of living a better life. Also capturing the day-to-day experiences in families that faced scarce resources, as well as the British policies that shaped a variety of personal decisions on the part of the newcomers, Exiled in the Homeland provides new keys to understanding this pivotal chapter in Jewish history.