Yitzchak Newman is in the market for his first house. For now, the young IT project manager lives with his wife and toddler in a rented basement apartment. Space is limited and the family yearns to attain the middle class ideal of owning their own home.
But unlike most aspiring home-owners, the Newmans are determined to enter the real estate market in what may be the world’s most politically sensitive strip of land. Whether to fulfill a religious prophecy or to live in blissful suburbia, the Newmans and thousands like them are eager to live in one of the dozens of Jewish enclaves in the West Bank. While the Israeli government has long offered subsidies to woo families to the contentious neighborhoods, demand has skyrocketed over the past few months. And realtors may have Barack Obama to thank for the recent boom.
A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust
by David S. Wyman and Rafael Medoff
(The New Press, 269 pp., $26.95)
