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Everyone knows about Herzl. Is it time for Max Nordau, the intermarried father of Zionism, to get his due?
(JTA) — In the weeks since Israel’s latest government was sworn in, questions relating to assimilation, defining Jewish identity and what it means to be a Zionist have been central to the public and political discourse, which in some ways is perhaps more heated and divisive than it has ever been.
One useful addition to the discourse might be recalling the thought and example of an author and Zionist leader who died 100 years ago last month. Max Nordau was a central figure in the early years of the modern political Zionist movement, literally founding the Zionist Organization (today’s World Zionist Organization) with Theodor Herzl and heading multiple Zionist congresses. A physician and renowned man of letters prior to his “conversion” to Zionism following the Dreyfus Affair in France, Nordau’s joining the Zionist movement gave it a notable boost in terms of renown and respectability.
He also coined the term “Muscular Judaism” — a redefinition of what it meant to be a Jew in the modern world; a critical shift away from the traditionally insular, “meek” Jewish archetype devoted solely to religious and intellectual pursuits. The “Muscular Jew” in theory and practice was necessary in order for a modern Jewish state to be established.
Reviving interest in Nordau now is a continuation of a conversation that an Israeli historian kicked off four decades ago. The historian, Yosef Nedava, embarked on a crusade to renew interest in and appreciation of Nordau. Nedava was a proponent of Revisionist Zionism, a movement led by Zeev Jabotinsky and later Menachem Begin that was considered to be the bitter ideological rival to the Labor Zionism of David Ben-Gurion and others. Broadly speaking, Revisionist Zionism was more territorially maximalist when it came to settling the Land of Israel, and favored liberal principles as opposed to the socialist ones championed by Ben-Gurion and his colleagues.
Nedava had a penchant for fighting the battles of unsung heroes of history who he thought should be better remembered. He led a crusade to clear the name of Yosef Lishansky, the founder of the NILI underground movement that assisted the British during World War I who was executed by the Ottomans. He also worked to exonerate fellow Revisionist Zionists accused of murdering Labor Zionist leader Haim Arlozorov — an event that shook Mandatory Palestine in the early 1930s and beyond.
About Nordau, Nedava said at the time, “For 60 years he wasn’t mentioned and he was one of the forgotten figures that only a few streets were named after.”
Nedava’s sentiment was clear, even if his words were somewhat hyperbolic. Nordau had in fact been studied and cited over the years, and there were in fact at least a few streets named after him in Israel. At the official state event marking six decades since Nordau’s death, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin even declared, “We never forgot Max Nordau, his teachings and his historical merits.”
Following Nedava’s efforts leading up to the 60th anniversary of Nordau’s death in 1983, Begin set up an official committee to memorialize the Zionist leader. The committee was tasked with publishing Nordau’s works, establishing events and honoring him in other ways like getting his face on a stamp “and maybe on a monetary bill,” according to Nedava.
But no bill was ever printed with Nordau’s visage, and there’s no question that Nordau never has gotten nearly the credit nor recognition that Herzl received. If the streets referenced by Nedava are any indicator, there are currently a respectable 33 streets named after Nordau in Israel, though that’s just about half of what Herzl’s got. There’s a city called Herzliya, with a massive image of the Zionist founder overlooking one of Israel’s most-trafficked highways. Nordau has a beach in Tel Aviv, a neighborhood in Netanya and a small village far in the north — but no city of his own.
Trees line alongside Nordau Avenue in Tel Aviv, March 4, 2017. (Anat Hermoni/FLASH90)
That’s not to say he didn’t have his fans. The Revisionist movement and Begin’s Herut and Likud parties idolized him, often mentioning and depicting him alongside Herzl and Vladimir Jabotinsky. Revisionist historian Benzion Netanyahu, father of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, greatly admired Nordau, even editing four entire volumes of his writings.
“Alongside Herzl, the Revisionists loved him, as he was a liberal. Yet he was also accepted and respected by those on the other side of the political spectrum,” Hezi Amiur, a scholar of Zionism and the curator of the Israeli Collection at the National Library of Israel, told me.
Like many of his generation and ilk, Nordau, himself the son of a rabbi, rejected religion and tradition as a teenager, opting to join mainstream European secular culture. He changed his name from Simon (Simcha) Maximilian Südfeld to Max Nordau. The shift in surname from Südfeld — meaning “southern field” — to Nordau — meaning “northern meadow” — was very much an intentional act for Nordau, the only son in his religiously observant family who chose northern European Germanic culture over the traditions of his fathers. He even married a Danish Protestant opera singer, a widow and mother of four named Anna Dons-Kaufmann.
In a congratulatory letter sent to Nordau following his marriage to Anna, Herzl, who was also not a particularly observant nor learned Jew, wrote:
Your concerns regarding the attitudes of our zealous circles [within the Zionist movement] regarding your mixed marriage are perhaps exaggerated. … If our project had already been fulfilled today, surely we would not have prevented a Jewish citizen, that is, a citizen of the existing Jewish state, from marrying a foreign-born gentile, through this marriage she would become a Jew without paying attention to her religion. If she has children, they will be Jews anyway.
This particular vision of Herzl’s has certainly not come to fruition, and the topic remains a particularly heated one, continuing to roil the Israeli political system, and — no less — Israel-Diaspora relations.
Similar political forces to those that have kept this particular Herzlian vision at bay may have also been responsible for ensuring that Nordau’s impressively whiskered face never made its way onto Israeli currency.
According to one report, Begin’s Likud government abandoned its efforts to get Nordau’s onto a shekel note in 1983 in order to avoid a potential coalition crisis. The concern was that the religious parties that were part of the ruling coalition could become outraged at the prospect of having someone married to a non-Jew on Israeli money. Whether the report was fully accurate or not, the sentiments behind such a potential coalition scare are certainly familiar to anyone following contemporary Israeli politics.
Nonetheless, perhaps the two most influential religious Zionist rabbis of the 20th century, Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaKohen Kook and his son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda, not only somewhat overlooked Nordau’s assimilationist tendencies and intermarriage, they even celebrated the man and his vision.
The elder Rabbi Kook, who served as the rabbi of Jaffa, Jerusalem and the Land of Israel in the opening decades of the 1900s, uncompromisingly criticized some of Nordau’s views, especially with respect to the separation of religion from Zionism. But he was a big fan of Nordau’s “Muscular Judaism,” writing among other things, that:
…a healthy body is what we need, we have been very busy with the soul, we have forgotten the sanctity of the body, we have neglected physical health and strength, we have forgotten that we have holy flesh, no less than we have the holy spirit… Through the strength of the flesh the weakened soul will be enlightened, the resurrection of the dead in their bodies.
Decades later his son, likely the most influential Israeli religious Zionist spiritual leader until his death in 1982, defined Nordau (as well as seminal Hebrew poet Shaul Tchernichovsky, who also married a non-Jew) as a “baal tshuvah” — a term imprecisely translated as “penitent” that is generally used to refer to non-observant Jews who become more religiously observant. Yehuda based his designation on a Talmudic teaching that “Anyone who transgresses and is ashamed of it is forgiven for all of his sins.”
Like anyone, Max Nordau probably regretted and felt ashamed of various decisions and actions in his life, but marrying a non-Jewish woman does not seem to be one of them. He and Anna stayed married for decades until his death in 1923.
Both Kooks were able to overlook the decidedly non-religious (if not outright anti-religious) life Nordau chose to lead. Instead of his personal choices, they focused on the central contribution he made to ensuring the reestablishment of a Jewish home in its ancestral land.
The majority of Israel’s current ruling coalition claims to be the ideological descendants of Begin and the Rabbis Kook, men who managed to have great admiration for the teachings and achievements of Nordau, even if they may have found his anti-religious, assimilationist tendencies and intermarriage reprehensible. Nedava wanted Israel to learn from Nordau 40 years ago. It’s possible the country still could today — if only the striking level of tolerance and respect with which he was considered in the past can still be summoned.
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Hungarian Filmmaker Says ‘Orgy of Antisemitism Overtaking the West,’ Feels ‘Ostracized’ by Film Industry
Hungarian film director László Nemes attends the photocall of “Moulin” at the 79th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France. Photo: Marco Barada / SOPA Images via Reuters Connect
Hungarian Jewish filmmaker László Nemes talked about antisemitism, the “politicization of cinema” regarding Jewish subject matters, and what he believes is an unhealthy “obsession with Jews” in a new interview with The Guardian published on Monday.
Nemes’s latest film, “Moulin,” which is about French resistance leader Jean Moulin, debuted at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday.
His 2025 film “Orphan” is about a teenage Jewish boy who survived the Holocaust by being hidden in an orphanage. While he searches for his missing father, he discovers the truth about how his mother survived the Holocaust. The film has so far not secured a US distribution deal, and Nemes believes it is because of the film’s Jewish subject matter at a time when tensions are high around the world.
“You should be able to talk about these things without being ostracized,” the filmmaker told The Guardian, adding that he feels “a little bit” ostracized by the industry.
“Even some response [to ‘Orphan’] from the media smells of an ideological standpoint,” he noted, explaining that he thinks the film was “ignored” at last year’s Venice Film Festival.
“There’s an orgy of antisemitism, an absolute, shameless orgy of antisemitism, overtaking the West,” added the director, whose grandmother is a Holocaust survivor. He also described a “race obsession” and a “puritan, moralizing, self-righteousness” ideology that he believes has taken over the cultural world and online.
Nemes won an Oscar in 2016 for his debut feature film “Son of Saul,” which follows a day and a half in the life of an Auschwitz concentration camp prisoner who is forced to clear out the corpses of fellow Jews from the gas chambers and place the bodies in ovens to be incinerated. The film won an array of awards, including the Oscar for best foreign language film. When asked how he thinks “Son of Saul” would be accepted if it was released today, Nemes told The Guardian: “I don’t even think it would make the [Oscar] shortlist today. Because of the politicization of cinema, because anything that’s Jewish is now considered … Nobody would touch it with a 10-feet pole.”
He also said he thinks boycotting Israeli film institutions, which thousands of Hollywood figures have pledged to do, is “anti-humanist regression.”
“And because it’s not identified as this, I think it’s very effective at spreading,” the filmmaker said. “And one of its very potent vectors has been antisemitism … The Jew has always been [cast as] the sort of internal enemy, and I think now [the idea of] the Jew as the internal enemy of the West has reached the dimensions of European antisemitism before the takeover by the National Socialist [Nazi] party.”
He further criticized the thousands of film industry professionals who support cultural boycotts of Israel or protest Israel’s military actions in the Gaza Strip, which target Hamas terrorists in the enclave who orchestrated the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Obviously, they prefer to attach themselves to an ideology that’s been around for a long time and that pretends to be humanitarian, but it’s actually not what it purports to be,” Nemes said. “Had they really cared about the people in this region, they would have revolted against these people being ruled by a totalitarian death cult that’s actually killing its own population and at unprecedented levels.”
He believes there is an “obsession with Jews,” and when referring to the difficulty in finding a US distributor for “Orphan,” he said: “People [would] ask me about Gaza, instead of, you know, asking about the movie. [They ask] if I signed this or that petition.”
“It’s tiring to hear the overclass of Hollywood lecture us morally,” Nemes added. “Not only in Hollywood, but in the world. There’s definitely an overclass of people cut from reality, and they are eager to preach to us … Sometimes I think it’s better if actors don’t, you know, speak up that much, because I don’t think they’re very much qualified to talk about anything. They should try to be actors, the best they can, and not become activists. It’s not really their role.”
While speaking to The Guardian, the Hungarian director also criticized fellow Jewish filmmaker Jonathan Glazer for the speech he made at the 2024 Academy Awards. When the British director went on stage to accept his Oscar for the Holocaust-focused historical drama “The Zone of Interest,” Glazer said he and the film’s producer James Wilson “stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of Oct. 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.”
Nemes told The Guardian that making a film about the Holocaust “imposes on its maker a need for responsibility.”
“I didn’t feel that he was responsible at all,” Nemes said, referring to the Glazer. “I thought he wanted to please that overclass of Hollywood with the line of good, righteous thought … I don’t believe that he understands anything about the reality of the region, yet he feels the need to do it. And I think it’s very presumptuous, very condescending.”
Nemes is a graduate of the Sam Spiegel International Film Lab, which is part of the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film & Television School.
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UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese Urges Germany to Get Over Holocaust Guilt in Antisemitic Tirade
Francesa Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, speaks at a conference, “A Cartography of Genocide: Israel’s Conduct in Gaza,” at the Roma Tre University, in Rome, Italy, Oct. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Remo Casilli
Francesca Albanese, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories, has published a bizarre social media post mixing antisemitic rhetoric with Holocaust revisionism, appearing to urge Germany to move beyond its historical guilt while casting Jews as arrogant and viewing themselves as morally superior to Europeans.
In a Facebook post published on Sunday, Albanese — who has an extensive history of using her role to denigrate Israel and seemingly rationalize the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s attacks against the Jewish state — called on Germans to absolve themselves of responsibility for the Nazi regime’s crimes and the historical burden of guilt tied to them.
The anti-Israel UN official argued that modern Germany’s efforts to come to terms with its past through strong support for the Jewish state do not reflect genuine remorse.
Instead, she claimed this stance reflects a “historical superiority syndrome” that has never been addressed and serves as a “convenient mask” for Germany’s return to the international community.
“The Western club accepted them because they proved themselves capable of tolerating certain members of the group that were previously ‘undesirable,’ and so they accepted the Jews, but not all of them,” Albanese wrote. “They learned that to survive in this world they must be superior. No longer a fragile minority. No longer a people in exile. No longer the people of the book. But the chosen people. ‘Chosen to rule?’ One might wonder when looking at what Israel has become.”
She then went on to claim that Germany does not respect Jews unless they are Zionist and behaves like a “socially deranged” state that enacts discriminatory laws, while calling on its citizens to free themselves from what she described as an obligation to Israel.
“I know Germans can do better,” Albanese concluded. “I have seen them. But they are called upon emancipating themselves. This is their chance.”
This latest controversy is far from the first involving Albanese, who has a mandate from the UN to advise the international body on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In her position, which she has held since 2022, Albanese has faced consistent criticism over a pattern of incendiary anti-Israel remarks, with officials accusing her of inciting violence and hatred.
Earlier this year, top diplomats from Austria, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, and France called for Albanese’s resignation after she delivered yet another inflammatory tirade against Israel.
During an Al Jazeera forum in Doha, Albanese described the state of Israel as “the common enemy of humanity” and accused the country of “planning and carrying out a genocide” during its defensive war against Hamas.
“It’s also true that never before has the global community seen the challenges that we all face, we who do not control large amounts of financial, algorithms, and weapons,” Albanese said at the time, appearing to invoke a long-standing antisemitic conspiracy that Jews control wealth and technology.
She also accused Western nations of being complicit in the so-called “genocide” by supplying arms and financing Israel, while claiming that Western media helps defend the Jewish state by “amplifying the pro-apartheid, genocidal narrative.”
Albanese has previously referred to a “Jewish lobby” controlling the US and Europe, compared Israel to Nazi Germany, and stated that Hamas’s violence against Israelis — including rape, murder, and kidnapping — needs to be “put in context.”
Despite her history of antisemitic statements, the UN has consistently refused to fire Albanese, citing her status as one of its “independent experts.”
Since taking on her UN role, Albanese has been at the center of controversy due to what critics, including US and European lawmakers, have described as antisemitic and anti-Israel public remarks.
Last year, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) faced intense pressure to block Albanese’s reappointment for another three-year term, with several countries and NGOs urging UN members to oppose the move due to her controversial remarks and alleged pro-Hamas stance.
Despite significant pressure and opposition, her mandate was confirmed to extend until 2028.
Last year, the UN launched a probe into Albanese for allegedly accepting a trip to Australia funded by pro-Hamas organizations.
In the past, she has also celebrated the anti-Israel protesters rampaging across US college campuses during the 2023-2024 academic year, saying they represent a “revolution” and give her “hope.”
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Kuwaiti Jiu-Jitsu Gold Medalist Refuses Handshake With Israeli Athlete: ‘We Do Not Respect Them At All’
An aerial view shows Kuwait City, Kuwait, March 16, 2020. Photo: Reuters / Stephanie McGehee.
Kuwaiti jiu-jitsu gold medalist Jassim Alhatem refused to shake hands with Israeli bronze medalist Yoav Manor at the Abu Dhabi Grand Slam Jiu-Jitsu World Tour on Friday, saying later in a video posted on social media that he has no respect for an athlete from Israel.
Alhatem won all four of his bouts in the men’s blue belt amateur under-77-kilogram category at the competition and took home the gold, while Manor earned the bronze for winning three of his four matches. At the medal ceremony, Alhatem refused to shake Manor’s hand and also declined to pose with him for the traditional photo of all the winners.
Alhatem later defended his actions in an Arabic-language video posted on Instagram. He described Israel as a “Zionist entity” and claimed he told Manor before the award ceremony, “I don’t want to know you and I don’t want to greet you. Stay on your side and I on my side, so no problem happens,” according to an English translation of the video. He further claimed that “as a Muslim,” he will not respect athletes from Israel and does not believe in separating politics from sports.
“These types we do not respect,” Alhatem said. “As Kuwaitis, we do not respect them at all … as a Muslim man, [you] must have principle. It is not right for me to play with them or respect them. It is not right. You as a Muslim must have a principle, even if you told me sport is separate from politics. No, no. There is no [separation]. If that were true, Russia wouldn’t be banned right now from participating in the Olympics.”
The International Olympic Committee has allowed eligible Russian athletes to compete as neutrals and not under the Russian flag.
The Israeli delegation at the Abu Dhabi Grand Slam Jiu-Jitsu World Tour said in a statement to the Israeli publication Ynet that “despite the tension, the organizers and Emirati hosts tried to calm the situation and persuade the Kuwaiti competitor to take part in the medal ceremony, but he chose to leave the podium area. Manor, for his part, remained focused on the sporting achievement: a bronze medal at a prestigious international competition, after an impressive day of bouts against opponents from around the world.”
Members of the Israeli delegation added that Alhatem said to Manor, “You Israelis kill children,” and “If you had reached the final, I would not have competed against you.”
Amir Boaron, the coach of Israel’s national jiu-jitsu team, also told Ynet that Alhatem called Manor a “child murderer.”
“Yoav continued trying to shake his hand and behave like an athlete. It is important for me to stress that the Emirati hosts welcomed us wonderfully and even apologized for the incident,” Boaron added.
The Abu Dhabi Grand Slam Jiu-Jitsu World Tour is organized by the United Arab Emirates, which normalized diplomatic relations with Israel when it signed the 2020 Abraham Accords, while Kuwait does not have diplomatic ties with Israel. Senior Kuwaiti officials have said the country “will be the last to normalize ties” with the Jewish state.