New Historians

But while I'm there, I wanted to quote, if I can find it quickly, a passage from another one of the people you write about.

I want you to tell us about the new historians is where we're going here, Ben.

And I wanted to mention, though, that there was something that resonated for me as I was trying to read my way through the history.

In a later chapter, you write about Maxime Rodinson, a French intellectual historian.

The two sets of contributors sit not just in separate rooms like employers and strikers in a bitter labor dispute, but in separate universes where the simplest fact often turns out to have diametrically opposite meanings.

And I felt reading that, I feel that maybe we're still in some ways often in the attempts to think about this history, often in separate rooms.

But one of the places, one of the turning points, I think, in your story is the kind of intervention made by a group of historians, Jewish historians, Israeli historians, called The New Historians.

You focus on Avi Schleim, but tell us about The New Historians because they really...