Daniel Bookman
Author / Lawyer / Geopolitical Analyst
I’ve lived in Israel for over forty years as a religious person, raising a family, as a practicing lawyer and a keen student of the ancient Jewish texts. During that time I’ve experienced firsthand the deep and often bitter divides that run through society religious and secular, left and right. Those divisions have intensified dramatically in recent years, especially after the last elections, when the country came close to tearing itself apart over proposed reforms to the legal system. For a moment, civil war no longer felt unthinkable.
At the same time, I have watched the United States descend into its own cycle of polarization and instability across two Trump election cycles. All of this followed by October 7th the mass pogrom perpetrated against Jews in the south of Israel, as well as the harsh realities of war, alongside a surge of anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiment across the world. All of this forced for me the unavoidable question: can societies save themselves from themselves?
My first instinct was to think deeply about democracy what it is, where it fails, and how political conflict might be resolved without destroying the social fabric. After October 7th, that inquiry widened. I began to see that the hostility toward Israel and Jews is not a separate phenomenon, but deeply connected to the same fractures undermining democratic societies more broadly.
Eventually, I gathered these ideas into a single, coherent framework, which became my book Beyond Power, now available on Amazon. My aim here is to share those insights, not to inflame debate, but to foster the kind of thinking that makes solutions possible. This journey also connects to an earlier concern of mine: the way religion is often caricatured or misunderstood. That inquiry became Fundamentally Rational, a book that explores religion, creation, and morality through a rational lens.
These appearances are intended as a way of extending these same efforts, to understand together before judging, to diagnose before prescribing, and to see whether clearer thinking can help mend a divided world.
