Around the world this weekend, Christians are preparing to celebrate Easter, the holiday marking the death and resurrection of Jesus and the culmination of the period of penitence that began with Ash Wednesday on February 17.
The first bishops in Jerusalem were Jews, and so the early Christian community commemorated the Feast of the Resurrection on the fourteenth day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, coinciding with the Jewish festival of Passover. In Temple times, the essential rite of Passover was the slaughter of a paschal lamb; the Christian Bible explicitly tied this ritual with Rome's crucifixion of Jesus: "Christ our passover is sacrificed for us" (1 Corinthians 5:7). Passover is also the background for the events portrayed in the synoptic Gospels leading up to the passion of Christ crucified.
At the First Council of Nicaea (325 C.E.), however, the Church resolutely decoupled Judaism from Christianity, severing the connection between the fourteenth of Nisan and Easter. "It is unbecoming," said the Emperor Constantine, "that on the holiest of festivals we should follow the customs of the Jews; henceforth let us have nothing in common with this odious people." Easter became a date on the solar calendar, with Jesus' resurrection being celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the March equinox.
To this day there is no denying that, for many Jews, Easter recalls dreadful memories. The holiday is the source of the Church's "teaching of contempt," the damning of all Jews for the supposed crime of deicide. The cry of "Christ-killers" would pursue Jews from medieval European ghettos to the 20th-century United States. Easter is also associated with the notorious libel that Jews needed the blood of Christian children to fulfill their Passover rituals. Many of Eastern Europe's worst pogroms, including the 1903 Kishinev massacre, were launched during Easter. Indeed, no Christian holiday did more than Easter to inspire the development of modern political Zionism as an answer to Europe's insoluble "Jewish problem."
In post-Holocaust Europe, that message of collective Jewish guilt became progressively toned down, with traces still remaining in the Passion Play performed in Germany every ten years since 1634. Instead, the Jewish state of Israel has come to be identified as, in effect, "this odious people" among the nations, an object of fierce political denunciation often couched in the discredited but still-toxic religious tropes of old. In 2002, an Athens newspaper depicted the PLO chief Yasir Arafat as Jesus being crucified by the Jews; today some pro-Palestinian groups falsely claim that the Jewish state arbitrarily forbids Christians from worshipping freely at Easter.
And yet, at a time when both the Jewish and the Christian traditions face a common danger in extremist Islam, it is worth stressing that contemporary Israel has no firmer friends in the world than evangelical Christians, who recall Jesus as an observant Jew and understand his resurrection not as a post-modern metaphor but as the Gospel truth. In democratic societies, even as they agree to disagree about matters of ultimate truth, believing Jews and Christians continue to have much to talk about, and to defend.
- April 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
Easter 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
World Jewish Congress
n a show of solidarity with Israel, leaders of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) will be gathering in Jerusalem at the end of the month. Not to be confused with the American Jewish Congress, of which it was originally an outgrowth, or the World Zionist Congress, founded by Theodor Herzl, the WJC is an umbrella group of Diaspora organizations (including the European Jewish Congress, the Latin American Jewish Congress, and others) that defines itself somewhat grandly as "the diplomatic arm of the Jewish people." If you haven't heard of it, there's a reason.
Six Jewish notables have led the WJC since its August 1936 founding in Geneva, Switzerland by 280 delegates from 32 countries. They were led by Rabbi Stephen Wise, then the president of the American Jewish Congress, and Nahum Goldmann: two men who saw themselves as champions of ordinary Jews against a condescending Jewish oligarchy. During the Holocaust, the WJC struggled—in vain—to pressure Allied officials into helping European Jews in Hitler's clutches.
When Wise died in 1949, Goldmann took full charge, running the WJC until 1977. A "statesman without a state," Goldmann negotiated the 1952 agreement obligating West Germany to pay reparations to Holocaust victims. A lifelong contrarian, Goldmann was an ambivalent Zionist at best, and after 1967 he became an outspoken critic of Israel's retention of Judea and Samaria. By 1973, he was rumored to be funding Jewish radicals advocating unconditional recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Philip Klutznick, an American millionaire who basically shared Goldmann's worldview, briefly bridged the gap at WJC until the 1979 arrival of Canadian billionaire Edgar M. Bronfman, who would run it until 2007. Bronfman, too, dissented from Israeli policies, though more discreetly. On other fronts, he led a 1986 campaign against Austria's ceremonial president Kurt Waldheim, the former UN secretary-general, over his Nazi past, and in 2000 embarked on a drive to pressure museums to identify and return Nazi-looted art works that had been the property of Holocaust victims. He also played a role in lobbying the Vatican to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.
By 2005, the WJC had become incapacitated by allegations of financial irregularities involving its top professional. Bronfman finally sacked the executive in 2007, and over the ensuing three years, with Ronald S. Lauder now at the helm, the stain on the organization has largely dissipated.
Rather than dissenting from Israeli policies, Lauder is appreciated in Jerusalem for his warm support of the Netanyahu government's diplomacy. Lauder also published a stern open letter criticizing President Barack Obama's handling of the U.S.-Israel relationship—a foray into political suasion that, for some, only highlighted how seldom the WJC is heard from.
Goldmann may have imagined that the WJC would operate as a democratic Jewish institution, but that is hardly how he ran it; as for serving as a counter to the Jewish oligarchy, without wealthy individuals to bankroll its existence, the WJC would have disappeared long ago. Whether any organization can act or claim to act as the diplomatic arm of a fractious Diaspora has always been debatable—which, together with its lack of political acumen, may be why the WJC hardly figures on the communal radar. The question of the moment is whether its recent, heartening concern for securing the national homelan
-- August 2010
Six Jewish notables have led the WJC since its August 1936 founding in Geneva, Switzerland by 280 delegates from 32 countries. They were led by Rabbi Stephen Wise, then the president of the American Jewish Congress, and Nahum Goldmann: two men who saw themselves as champions of ordinary Jews against a condescending Jewish oligarchy. During the Holocaust, the WJC struggled—in vain—to pressure Allied officials into helping European Jews in Hitler's clutches.
When Wise died in 1949, Goldmann took full charge, running the WJC until 1977. A "statesman without a state," Goldmann negotiated the 1952 agreement obligating West Germany to pay reparations to Holocaust victims. A lifelong contrarian, Goldmann was an ambivalent Zionist at best, and after 1967 he became an outspoken critic of Israel's retention of Judea and Samaria. By 1973, he was rumored to be funding Jewish radicals advocating unconditional recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Philip Klutznick, an American millionaire who basically shared Goldmann's worldview, briefly bridged the gap at WJC until the 1979 arrival of Canadian billionaire Edgar M. Bronfman, who would run it until 2007. Bronfman, too, dissented from Israeli policies, though more discreetly. On other fronts, he led a 1986 campaign against Austria's ceremonial president Kurt Waldheim, the former UN secretary-general, over his Nazi past, and in 2000 embarked on a drive to pressure museums to identify and return Nazi-looted art works that had been the property of Holocaust victims. He also played a role in lobbying the Vatican to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.
By 2005, the WJC had become incapacitated by allegations of financial irregularities involving its top professional. Bronfman finally sacked the executive in 2007, and over the ensuing three years, with Ronald S. Lauder now at the helm, the stain on the organization has largely dissipated.
Rather than dissenting from Israeli policies, Lauder is appreciated in Jerusalem for his warm support of the Netanyahu government's diplomacy. Lauder also published a stern open letter criticizing President Barack Obama's handling of the U.S.-Israel relationship—a foray into political suasion that, for some, only highlighted how seldom the WJC is heard from.
Goldmann may have imagined that the WJC would operate as a democratic Jewish institution, but that is hardly how he ran it; as for serving as a counter to the Jewish oligarchy, without wealthy individuals to bankroll its existence, the WJC would have disappeared long ago. Whether any organization can act or claim to act as the diplomatic arm of a fractious Diaspora has always been debatable—which, together with its lack of political acumen, may be why the WJC hardly figures on the communal radar. The question of the moment is whether its recent, heartening concern for securing the national homelan
-- August 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
The Impresario of Zionism
Theodor Herzl, father of modern political Zionism, was born in Budapest 150 years ago next Sunday, May 2. He died at age forty-four in Vienna, four-and-a-half decades before the establishment of the state of Israel. Herzl came into maturity with no particular Jewish learning, no Hebrew, and scant ties to his community. Yet with his top hat, white gloves, and tails, this broadminded Central European journalist with a utopian streak came to be the foremost revolutionary of the modern Jewish world.
The basics outlines of Herzl's life are fairly well known. Born into a comfortable, assimilated family, he considered law but settled on writing for the theater and journalism, where he excelled. Politically, the pivotal moment for him came in 1894 when he was covering the Dreyfus trial in presumably enlightened France. There and then he concluded that the only answer to European anti-Semitism was the creation of a Jewish state, warning that, as far as hatred of Jews was concerned, "much worse is to come." To the chagrin of many rabbis, socialists, and assimilationists, his personal magnetism drew masses of Jews to the Zionist cause, while his sense of destiny gave him the confidence to seek support from Ottoman rulers, the Vatican, and Jewish grandees.
Herzl was not the first theoretician of political Zionism, or the first to think sensibly about the steps needed to create a third Jewish commonwealth. His unparalleled contribution was to put Zionism on both the Jewish and the international agenda. As the movement's leading prophet, he waged a fanatically intensive yet tactically shrewd campaign that virtually willed the state into being.
In 1897, after the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, Herzl recorded in his diary: "In Basel I founded the Jewish state. If I were to say this out loud today, everybody would laugh at me. In five years, perhaps, but certainly in fifty, everybody will agree." Unlike a Washington, Gandhi, or Mandela, Israel's founding father did not live to see his dream come to fruition; but he foresaw correctly.
-- April 2010
The basics outlines of Herzl's life are fairly well known. Born into a comfortable, assimilated family, he considered law but settled on writing for the theater and journalism, where he excelled. Politically, the pivotal moment for him came in 1894 when he was covering the Dreyfus trial in presumably enlightened France. There and then he concluded that the only answer to European anti-Semitism was the creation of a Jewish state, warning that, as far as hatred of Jews was concerned, "much worse is to come." To the chagrin of many rabbis, socialists, and assimilationists, his personal magnetism drew masses of Jews to the Zionist cause, while his sense of destiny gave him the confidence to seek support from Ottoman rulers, the Vatican, and Jewish grandees.
Herzl was not the first theoretician of political Zionism, or the first to think sensibly about the steps needed to create a third Jewish commonwealth. His unparalleled contribution was to put Zionism on both the Jewish and the international agenda. As the movement's leading prophet, he waged a fanatically intensive yet tactically shrewd campaign that virtually willed the state into being.
In 1897, after the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, Herzl recorded in his diary: "In Basel I founded the Jewish state. If I were to say this out loud today, everybody would laugh at me. In five years, perhaps, but certainly in fifty, everybody will agree." Unlike a Washington, Gandhi, or Mandela, Israel's founding father did not live to see his dream come to fruition; but he foresaw correctly.
-- April 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
High Season
Everywhere one goes, Jerusalem is crowded with visitors. Hotels are near capacity. The streets are jam-packed with tour buses. So far this year, 2.2 million tourists have visited the country. August was one of the best months ever, but tens of thousands more have now arrived for the Sukkot holiday, among them 7,000 evangelicals from 100 countries to celebrate the Christian Feast of Tabernacles. Hanukkah and Christmas promise still more
Of course, sojourning to the Holy Land is nothing new, having been practiced from time immemorial by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In ancient times, Diaspora Jews made pilgrimages to the Temple in Jerusalem. During the era of the Crusades, Benjamin of Tudela, journeying thither and yon from Spain, chronicled Palestine's remnant Jewish civilization. Judah al-Harizi reported in 1218 that the Muslims had bettered conditions for the local Jews. The travelogues of Evliya Çelebi, a Muslim Turk, recount the 1584 exodus of Safed's Jews after incessant Arab and Druse assaults. Throughout the centuries, numbers of Jewish visitors would stay on to settle in the land, while others, preeminently Theodor Herzl in 1898, would go back to organize the systematic return of the Jewish people to their homeland.
Many visitors to 21st-century Israel come out of religious conviction. Of this year's arrivals, about half are on a repeat visit. The single biggest source of tourists is the United States: some 538,000 Americans came last year, almost a quarter of the total. And yet 60 percent of U.S. Jews have yet to visit Israel—in contrast to their British coreligionists, of whom 95 percent have visited at least once. Somewhat brightening the American picture, over 230,000 young people, mainly from the U.S., have come on subsidized Birthright programs in the last ten years.
Whatever the impetus, and whatever their origins, once in the country tourists can't help being struck by the contrasts contained in its 10,000 square miles: about the same area as the state of New Jersey. In a matter of hours one can drive from snowcapped Mount Hermon in the northern Golan Heights to the Negev desert in the south. One can even hike the nine or so miles from the Mediterranean coast and cross the 1949 armistice lines into the West Bank. From atop a mountain ridge in Samaria one can scan metropolitan Tel Aviv, where the bulk of Israel's population is concentrated.
Such experiences yield keen geostrategic insights. But they are hardly the only attraction: untold numbers come for the rewards of sun, sea, and recreation. All told, it is little wonder that one in every twelve jobs in Israel is tourism-related, or that the industry is expected in 2010 to contribute 7.2 percent of the country's GDP.
Precisely because tourism has such enormous political, economic, and psychological ramifications, it is a sector long targeted by Israel's enemies. In 1972, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine murdered 26 people, including sixteen Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, at the country's airport. In 2000, following an excellent year for tourism, the Palestinian Arab leadership unleashed its second intifada, hitting cafes, restaurants, public transportation, even a Passover Seder at a Netanya hotel. The onslaught led to a dramatic drop in visitors; in June 2001, after a gruesome Tel Aviv nightclub bombing, the American Reform movement canceled its Israel youth programming. Those who continued to come during those dark days were disproportionately religious Jews and Christians.
Israel's detractors in the West have also invested heavily in boycotts aimed at dissuading academics, musicians, athletes, and ordinary people from visiting. Incredibly, the British Advertising Standards Authority was persuaded to ban Israel's ministry of tourism from depicting Jerusalem's Western Wall and Temple Mount in its UK advertisements. Even so, however, and despite everything, millions of travelers continue to come, thumbing their noses at the international campaign to defame and isolate the Jewish state, and dramatically avowing their confidence in its future.
-- September 2010
Of course, sojourning to the Holy Land is nothing new, having been practiced from time immemorial by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In ancient times, Diaspora Jews made pilgrimages to the Temple in Jerusalem. During the era of the Crusades, Benjamin of Tudela, journeying thither and yon from Spain, chronicled Palestine's remnant Jewish civilization. Judah al-Harizi reported in 1218 that the Muslims had bettered conditions for the local Jews. The travelogues of Evliya Çelebi, a Muslim Turk, recount the 1584 exodus of Safed's Jews after incessant Arab and Druse assaults. Throughout the centuries, numbers of Jewish visitors would stay on to settle in the land, while others, preeminently Theodor Herzl in 1898, would go back to organize the systematic return of the Jewish people to their homeland.
Many visitors to 21st-century Israel come out of religious conviction. Of this year's arrivals, about half are on a repeat visit. The single biggest source of tourists is the United States: some 538,000 Americans came last year, almost a quarter of the total. And yet 60 percent of U.S. Jews have yet to visit Israel—in contrast to their British coreligionists, of whom 95 percent have visited at least once. Somewhat brightening the American picture, over 230,000 young people, mainly from the U.S., have come on subsidized Birthright programs in the last ten years.
Whatever the impetus, and whatever their origins, once in the country tourists can't help being struck by the contrasts contained in its 10,000 square miles: about the same area as the state of New Jersey. In a matter of hours one can drive from snowcapped Mount Hermon in the northern Golan Heights to the Negev desert in the south. One can even hike the nine or so miles from the Mediterranean coast and cross the 1949 armistice lines into the West Bank. From atop a mountain ridge in Samaria one can scan metropolitan Tel Aviv, where the bulk of Israel's population is concentrated.
Such experiences yield keen geostrategic insights. But they are hardly the only attraction: untold numbers come for the rewards of sun, sea, and recreation. All told, it is little wonder that one in every twelve jobs in Israel is tourism-related, or that the industry is expected in 2010 to contribute 7.2 percent of the country's GDP.
Precisely because tourism has such enormous political, economic, and psychological ramifications, it is a sector long targeted by Israel's enemies. In 1972, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine murdered 26 people, including sixteen Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, at the country's airport. In 2000, following an excellent year for tourism, the Palestinian Arab leadership unleashed its second intifada, hitting cafes, restaurants, public transportation, even a Passover Seder at a Netanya hotel. The onslaught led to a dramatic drop in visitors; in June 2001, after a gruesome Tel Aviv nightclub bombing, the American Reform movement canceled its Israel youth programming. Those who continued to come during those dark days were disproportionately religious Jews and Christians.
Israel's detractors in the West have also invested heavily in boycotts aimed at dissuading academics, musicians, athletes, and ordinary people from visiting. Incredibly, the British Advertising Standards Authority was persuaded to ban Israel's ministry of tourism from depicting Jerusalem's Western Wall and Temple Mount in its UK advertisements. Even so, however, and despite everything, millions of travelers continue to come, thumbing their noses at the international campaign to defame and isolate the Jewish state, and dramatically avowing their confidence in its future.
-- September 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Jabotinsky
Dedicated to the memory of Shmuel Katz
The 70th yahrzeit of Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940) was marked on July 11, at Mount Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem, by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres. There was nary a mention of it in the Israeli media—an extraordinary omission given that Jabotinsky was not only a founder of the Haganah and the supreme commander of the Irgun but also a towering Zionist theoretician and leader.
Jabotinsky was born and raised in cosmopolitan Odessa, then a vibrant hub of Jewish intellectual and cultural life. Drawn to journalism, he became an accomplished feuilletonist. His life took a fateful turn in 1903, when, fearing the pogroms sweeping Russia would reach his city, he pulled together a Jewish self-defense group. In the same year, he attended the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basle, which rejected an anguished Theodor Herzl’s plea to consider settling for an autonomous Jewish sanctuary in East Africa.
During World War I, while the Zionist establishment cautiously maintained its neutrality, Jabotinsky became the driving force behind the formation of a Jewish Legion to fight alongside the Allies. In the early 1920s, as the British mandatory authorities in Palestine capitulated regularly to Arab pressure, he organized defensive measures against Arab rioting, an activity for which he was at first imprisoned by the British and later amnestied and deported.
Jabotinsky was unwavering in his insistence that Zionism’s immediate and uncompromising goal had to be Herzl's original vision of an actual Jewish state. A rupture over the establishment's accommodationist approach toward Britain was inevitable. In 1925 he founded the Revisionist Zionist Organization, and ten years later led it out of the Congress. On Tisha b'Av 1938, he delivered a chillingly prophetic speech in Warsaw imploring the Jews of Poland to "see the volcano which will soon begin to spew forth its fires of destruction"—and to escape while they still could.
Two years later, at the age of fifty-nine, Jabotinsky died suddenly in upstate New York after inspecting an honor guard of his Betar youth movement. In Tel Aviv, the Labor newspaper Davar, which had opposed his every political move, graciously editorialized: "Jabotinsky has died. That gifted violin has been shattered." The reference was to his formidable powers as a polemicist and spellbinding speaker, capable of holding an audience in Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, English, French, or German.
Jabotinsky's first biographer, Joseph B. Schechtman, described him as a "rebel, statesman, fighter, and prophet." To Shmuel Katz, his definitive biographer, "Jabo" was simply a "lone wolf." His emphasis on ethnic pride and regard for military discipline made liberals uncomfortable and led enemies to slur him as a fascist, an odd charge against a passionate 19th-century liberal and advocate of women's rights. Like others, Jabotinsky may not have fully fathomed nascent Arab nationalism; but he abhorred the idea that Arab and Jew could not live together peaceably.
Jabotinsky's multilingual journalism and literary output are keys, in their own way, to understanding his character and his take on life in general and Jewish life (and the Jewish imagination) in particular. Throughout his hectic political career, he somehow managed to write novels, poems, stories, patriotic songs, essays, and a regular column in New York's Yiddish-language Morning Journal. In reviewing an English translation of one of his novels, Hillel Halkin found a portrait of the author himself in a character inclined by nature to free-spiritedness but committed to a life of duty and self-sacrifice.
Do Jabotinsky's uncompromising views, including on the territorial integrity of the Land of Israel, enjoy a 21st-century constituency in the Jewish state? Not in the Likud, which claims his political legacy, and not in the mostly Orthodox-led settlement movement, which has its own heroes. Even in death, it seems, Jabo remains a lone wolf
-- July 2010
The 70th yahrzeit of Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940) was marked on July 11, at Mount Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem, by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres. There was nary a mention of it in the Israeli media—an extraordinary omission given that Jabotinsky was not only a founder of the Haganah and the supreme commander of the Irgun but also a towering Zionist theoretician and leader.
Jabotinsky was born and raised in cosmopolitan Odessa, then a vibrant hub of Jewish intellectual and cultural life. Drawn to journalism, he became an accomplished feuilletonist. His life took a fateful turn in 1903, when, fearing the pogroms sweeping Russia would reach his city, he pulled together a Jewish self-defense group. In the same year, he attended the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basle, which rejected an anguished Theodor Herzl’s plea to consider settling for an autonomous Jewish sanctuary in East Africa.
During World War I, while the Zionist establishment cautiously maintained its neutrality, Jabotinsky became the driving force behind the formation of a Jewish Legion to fight alongside the Allies. In the early 1920s, as the British mandatory authorities in Palestine capitulated regularly to Arab pressure, he organized defensive measures against Arab rioting, an activity for which he was at first imprisoned by the British and later amnestied and deported.
Jabotinsky was unwavering in his insistence that Zionism’s immediate and uncompromising goal had to be Herzl's original vision of an actual Jewish state. A rupture over the establishment's accommodationist approach toward Britain was inevitable. In 1925 he founded the Revisionist Zionist Organization, and ten years later led it out of the Congress. On Tisha b'Av 1938, he delivered a chillingly prophetic speech in Warsaw imploring the Jews of Poland to "see the volcano which will soon begin to spew forth its fires of destruction"—and to escape while they still could.
Two years later, at the age of fifty-nine, Jabotinsky died suddenly in upstate New York after inspecting an honor guard of his Betar youth movement. In Tel Aviv, the Labor newspaper Davar, which had opposed his every political move, graciously editorialized: "Jabotinsky has died. That gifted violin has been shattered." The reference was to his formidable powers as a polemicist and spellbinding speaker, capable of holding an audience in Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, English, French, or German.
Jabotinsky's first biographer, Joseph B. Schechtman, described him as a "rebel, statesman, fighter, and prophet." To Shmuel Katz, his definitive biographer, "Jabo" was simply a "lone wolf." His emphasis on ethnic pride and regard for military discipline made liberals uncomfortable and led enemies to slur him as a fascist, an odd charge against a passionate 19th-century liberal and advocate of women's rights. Like others, Jabotinsky may not have fully fathomed nascent Arab nationalism; but he abhorred the idea that Arab and Jew could not live together peaceably.
Jabotinsky's multilingual journalism and literary output are keys, in their own way, to understanding his character and his take on life in general and Jewish life (and the Jewish imagination) in particular. Throughout his hectic political career, he somehow managed to write novels, poems, stories, patriotic songs, essays, and a regular column in New York's Yiddish-language Morning Journal. In reviewing an English translation of one of his novels, Hillel Halkin found a portrait of the author himself in a character inclined by nature to free-spiritedness but committed to a life of duty and self-sacrifice.
Do Jabotinsky's uncompromising views, including on the territorial integrity of the Land of Israel, enjoy a 21st-century constituency in the Jewish state? Not in the Likud, which claims his political legacy, and not in the mostly Orthodox-led settlement movement, which has its own heroes. Even in death, it seems, Jabo remains a lone wolf
-- July 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
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