Shalom Goldman, Starstruck in the Promised Land: How the Arts Shaped American Passions about Israel. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 244 pp.

This chapter reviews Shalom Goldman's Starstruck in the Promised Land: How the Arts Shaped American Passions about Israel (2019). Despite its title, this book has little to say about how “the arts shaped American passions about Israel.” The exposition of its “arts” examples is more lucid in the book's introduction than in its body. More than two-thirds of the volume convey insufficiently researched or inaccurate reports about Israeli history, often focusing on issues that have nothing to do with the ostensible topic of the arts' presumptive “soft power” in the shaping of the U.S.–Israel relationship. There is also an untoward amount of autobiographical memoir writing crisscrossed with sweeping, questionable allegations about the two Jewish cultures under study. Goldman seems unconcerned about delivering on his promise to write about American cultural icons and Israel, and he produces such a short roster of these icons, that the book inculcates a contrary, and possibly correct, impression suggesting that, on a celebrity cultural level at least, America has never really been “starstruck” about the promised land.