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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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The post Everyone knows about Herzl. Is it time for Max Nordau, the intermarried father of Zionism, to get his due? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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French far-right leader accused of antisemitism, defended by Israeli minister
(JTA) — A French far-right leader is battling antisemitism allegations days after his party made historic gains in the country’s Senate elections — and an Israeli cabinet minister has come to his defense.
Jordan Bardella, the president of France’s nationalist, anti-immigration National Rally, came under fire this week for accusations that he made antisemitic remarks in private messages.
The controversy arose after the National Rally, whose leaders have sought to distance the party from the antisemitic roots of its founders, jumped to at least 14 seats in the French Senate elections on Sunday. The results meant the party and its allies surpassed the 10-seat threshold to form a parliamentary group in the upper house for the first time.
The Senate will remain controlled by a traditional conservative and center-right alliance, though that bloc lost several seats. The National Rally’s progress will give it more funding and better representation in leadership roles and committees.
Mediapart, a left-leaning French investigative outlet, reported on Monday that Bardella years ago allegedly sent antisemitic statements, including messages that said “all the banks are owned by Jews” and “the Jew must dominated (sic) other peoples, crush them and rob them, a Zionist is necessarily and profoundly Jewish.”
The messages were allegedly sent between 2013 and 2015, during Bardella’s early years in the party, then called the National Front. He joined the party in 2012 at age 16.
Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, who invited Bardella to a Jerusalem conference on antisemitism in 2025, defended him against the allegations. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he knows Bardella personally and that they are in regular contact.
Even if the quotes attributed to Bardella were authenticated, Chikli said, “a man is not sealed at 17. What matters is the 15 years that followed, and the man he became.”
Chikli referenced Bardella’s visit to the sites where Hamas killed Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023. He said that Bardella spoke in Jerusalem “against antisemitism and against anti-Zionism” and opposed President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state.
“No one will convince me that Jordan Bardella hates the Jewish people or the Jewish state,” said Chikli. “Just as no one will convince me that Emmanuel Macron respects them.”
Mediapart, which has a history of exposing political scandals, said it independently authenticated Bardella’s alleged conversations and drew them from a larger base of evidence corroborated by witness accounts. JTA has not independently verified the messages.
Bardella said on X that the alleged conversations were “blatant falsehoods” designed to undermine the National Rally ahead of France’s presidential election in April 2027. Marine Le Pen, the National Rally’s presidential candidate, is polling in first place as Macron prepares to step down because of term limits.
Mediapart, which has a history of exposing political scandals, said it independently authenticated Bardella’s alleged conversations and drew them from a larger base of evidence corroborated by witness accounts. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has not independently verified the messages.
Bardella said on X that the alleged conversations were “blatant falsehoods” designed to undermine the National Rally ahead of France’s presidential election in April 2027. Marine Le Pen, the National Rally’s presidential candidate, is polling in first place as Emmanuel Macron prepares to step down because of term limits. Le Pen and Bardella have led the National Rally as a duo, and Bardella was set to be the party’s candidate until a July court ruling, which upheld criminal financial charges against Le Pen while also lifting a ban on her seeking public office. She has said she would name Bardella prime minister if she wins.
Bardella also said at a parliamentary meeting on Tuesday that he plans to take legal action against Mediapart, including possible complaints for forgery and forged documents, and accused the outlet of waging “total war” against his party. Le Pen, sitting next to Bardella, said that she had “absolute confidence” in him.
Israel’s Chikli said on social media that he and Bardella had common enemies. “Like the leftists in Israel, the leftists in France are experts at character assassination,” he said in his post, sharing a photo of himself shaking hands with Bardella at the Nova massacre site.
Chikli has cultivated ties between the Israeli government and European far-right parties, including others that have been criticized for histories of antisemitic and neo-Nazi figures in their ranks, such as Vox in Spain and the Sweden Democrats in Sweden.
Bardella, the National Rally and Chikli did not immediately respond to JTA requests for comment.
Chikli and Bardella both also accused Mediapart of a left-wing agenda. They each noted that the outlet’s co-founder, Edy Plenel, expressed sympathy in 1972 for the Palestinian militant group Black September, which killed 11 Israelis in a terrorist attack at the Munich Olympic Games that year. Plenel later disavowed those comments, which he said he made when he was 20.
Michel Wieviorka, a Jewish French sociologist who researches racism and extremism, told JTA that the antisemitism allegations strike at the heart of the National Rally’s aim to prove their “respectability.”
Le Pen has sought for over a decade to detoxify the party’s image. In 2015, she expelled from the party her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, a co-founder of the National Rally in 1972 who was repeatedly convicted of hate speech and Holocaust denial. Another founder and early leader of the party was Pierre Bousquet, who formerly served in the Nazi Waffen-SS.
Today, support for Israel has become key to the National Rally’s avowed renunciation of its antisemitic past.
“The strategy of [Bardella’s] party is to appear as the best friend of Jews, and Israel,” said Wieviorka.
Bardella invoked his visit to Israel in his denial of the alleged antisemitic messages.
“Since I began my political engagement, I have never had any ambiguity on the subject of the fight against antisemitism, to the point of being received, in 2025, by the Israeli government,” he said on X.
Meanwhile, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said on X that the accusations against Bardella revealed “the true face of the far right.”
“To all those with short memories: antisemitism is not a slip-up for the [National Rally], it is the history of this party,” said Barrot.
The post French far-right leader accused of antisemitism, defended by Israeli minister appeared first on The Forward.
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In a time of uncertainty, European Jews renovate synagogues and dedicate Torah scrolls
(JTA) —
Getting a “200-year-old lady” ready for a major debut is quite a task. But in Vienna, the Jewish community’s historic main synagogue made it just in time for the Jewish New Year.
The “lady” — Vienna’s stately Stadttempel synagogue, or City Temple — has been rededicated after more than a year of top-to-bottom renovations, from floors to windows, to the heating and cooling systems, from safety features to restroom facilities. The job cost more than 10 million euros, or $11.3 million.
The synagogue was “still beautiful but has its signs of age,” Rabbi Jaron Engelmayer told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a phone interview. “And it wasn’t adequate for some matters of today.”
“The whole concept was sticking to what it was and still is, but it has a new face,” said Engelmayer, who has been chief rabbi of Vienna’s Jewish community since 2020. The Orthodox congregation also inaugurated a new Torah scroll in ceremonies Sept. 15. Parts of it incorporated earlier manuscripts “written in the old synagogue of the Middle Ages in Vienna,” making it a bridge to history, he said.
Large and small, Jewish communities in Europe are marking the season of renewal in concrete ways at a time of uncertainty seeded by antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment. In Budapest, the historic Rákospalota synagogue — used as a library warehouse for decades — recently held its first service in its renovated premises. And a 15-member Jewish prayer group in Leipzig has welcomed its first Torah scroll, on a 99-year loan.
All are looking to the future, whether fixing a hole in the roof or dedicating a holy book.
“Jews by definition have to be optimistic,” said Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, head of the Munich-based Conference of European Rabbis, which represents some 800 Orthodox Jewish communities.
“They have no other choice. And having said that, if in the past there was a tendency to say, ‘okay, the situation is bad over here, let’s go somewhere else,’ today, wherever you look, the situation is not good,” he said.
Taking action is more constructive than regretting current circumstances, said Rabbi Elisa Klapheck, head of Germany’s non-Orthodox General Rabbinical Assembly, which has 45 member rabbis. “We can lament antisemitism, we can lament attacks on Jewish communities, but that doesn’t help us,” she said. “So I think on a smaller scale, but maybe a much more resilient scale, the chagim [holidays] have shown that there was a positive atmosphere.”
Ruth Ellen Gruber, developer of the Jewish Heritage Europe portal, a project of the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe, expressed amazement at the pace of the rehabilitations.
“Despite increasing incidents of antisemitism, there are so many synagogue restoration projects that I cannot keep up,” said Gruber. Whether maintenance or preservation, all are “sign[s] of resilience among Jewish communities, volunteers, researchers, NGOs, civic bodies, and others,” she said in an email to JTA.
Examples include the Ashkenazi Great Synagogue in Constanta, Romania; the grand synagogue in Metz, France; the domed synagogue in Trencin, Slovakia; the Etz Hayyim Synagogue in Larissa, Greece; and the historic Yanbol synagogue in Istanbul.
“Some will serve as museums or cultural centers that usually house Jewish heritage exhibitions; others will serve as venues for both Jewish worship and cultural events,” she said.
In Leipzig, Rabbi Esther Jonas-Maerten doesn’t actually have a synagogue building for her Beth Ez Chaim “Lehrhaus,” a study group that meets in private homes. But she now has a Torah scroll for participants in the program, which is open to all who wish to learn more about Judaism.
The scroll, on a 99-year-loan from the Kehilat Shalom synagogue in Gaithersburg, Maryland, will be formally dedicated in ceremonies on Oct. 4. “That will be the first public event with our new Torah,” Jonas-Maerten, a Conservative rabbi, told JTA in a phone interview.
After a long and fruitless search for a scroll her group could afford, she asked Washington, D.C.-based Rabbi Lauren Tuchman to share her appeal: “I wrote a letter basically saying, ‘Most wanted! A sefer Torah!” Jonas-Maerten recalled. “Within two weeks, I got a response.”
The U.S.-Europe connection has been a fruitful one, when it comes to Torahs.
Last year, the Conservative congregation Ki Tov in Warsaw received the gift of a scroll from New Jersey sister congregation B’nai Sholom/Fair Lawn Jewish Center. The scroll, originally from Europe, was donated in memory of Holocaust survivors.
The independent Berlin-Brandenburg congregation Ohel Hachidush received its first scroll in 2008 from Shir Tikvah in Troy, Michigan, and purchased a second scroll in 2024 from retiring Rabbi Moshe Halfon of Mount Sinai Synagogue in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Both needed repair, especially the first one, Cantor Jalda Rebling, a Jewish Renewal movement ordainee who co-founded Ohel Hachidush with Anna Adam, told JTA.
“Its brokenness is also a symbol, I always say, for our Jewish history here in Europe,” said Rebling, “because all our Jewish lives are broken, and we all love this Torah.”
Vienna’s Jewish community currently has about 12,000 members. Before World War II, it numbered close to 200,000, according to the community’s website. Many fled, and about 47,000 Austrian Jews, most of them from Vienna, were murdered in the Holocaust.
Today’s community is “quite small in numbers, but very highly active and diverse in its traditions,” said Engelmayer, whose mother’s family came from Switzerland and father’s from Poland. “It goes from Ashkenazi to Sephardi, from secular to ultra-Orthodox, and it’s a whole range between. And it feels like a family.”
During Engelmayer’s tenure, “there was the COVID crisis and afterwards the war in Ukraine, which brought a lot of fugitives and refugees to Vienna – also Jews. And of course, the 7th of October, which brought a big rise in antisemitism, which is still being dealt with today.”
Nevertheless, celebrants went “through the streets of Vienna with high hats and proudly Jewish, bringing the new Torah scroll into the restored synagogue,” Engelmayer said: All those challenges led to “an increase of inner strength, of holding together, of answering to the crisis by much more Jewish life and being more active and more visible.”
The post In a time of uncertainty, European Jews renovate synagogues and dedicate Torah scrolls appeared first on The Forward.
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For a few terrifying minutes, Israelis were heroes again
For a few terrifying minutes aboard a Flydubai flight bound for Tel Aviv on Wednesday, a group of Israeli passengers found themselves with a problem that was considerably more immediate than the usual arguments about Israel. Someone in the cockpit had become violent, the airplane was descending rapidly and the people aboard had to figure out what to do. They did.
According to the emerging account, Israeli passengers helped overpower the attacker and restrain him, while pilots traveling as passengers assisted in getting the aircraft safely onto the ground in Saudi Arabia. Other passengers provided medical assistance. A flight that could have ended in catastrophe instead became one of those extraordinary stories in which ordinary people discover that the few seconds available for a decision are the only seconds that matter.
There is something refreshing about the simplicity of the story. The passengers were confronted with a danger that required immediate action, and some of them acted. Israelis watching the story unfold saw a familiar national trait emerge in circumstances where slogans had very little use.
Former Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy captured the comic quality of it perfectly. “Overall, the probability that a plane full of Israelis will contain a trained assault team, two additional pilots, and, statistically, at least one cardiac surgeon, psychologist, lawyer, and diamond dealer is substantially higher than 50%.”
The joke survives the caution that is always needed with stereotypes because anyone who has spent time around Israelis recognizes the type. Put 180 Israelis in a metal tube in the skies and you have a statistically improbable concentration of people who have served in the military, flown aircraft, treated patients, run companies, handled emergencies, argued with authority and developed the conviction that whatever has gone wrong can probably be fixed if everyone stops panicking and starts doing something.
For Israelis, that quality has long been part of the national mythology. The country was built around the idea that its people would have to improvise their way through circumstances that seemed to offer very little room for error. The mythology produced its own cliches: the engineer who can repair anything, the doctor who appears when somebody needs one, the stranger who immediately assumes responsibility because waiting for an official response seems inefficient.
In the military, it is the officer who shouts “after me” – aharai! – rather than leading from behind.
This is the Israel that was admired after the 1967 Six Day War – or for the 1977 commando raid on Entebbe Airport that rescued over 100 hostages held by pro-Palestinian hijackers.
Sadly, much of the world has encountered a very different Israeli stereotype in recent years. Israelis have increasingly become symbols in arguments about war, occupation, nationalism and international law. Israel itself has become increasingly isolated, and Israelis have experienced insults and worse while traveling abroad.
October 7 added another layer to the picture. The country that had spent decades cultivating an image of military competence suddenly had to confront an astonishing failure of intelligence and security. The image of the Israeli who always knows what to do became harder to sustain when the country itself had been caught so badly unprepared.
And Israel has been widely and wildly vilified around the world – by the far left, by the far right, by antisemites of every stripe and activists who have made Zionism a dirty word and have turned Israel into an avatar for everything that is wrong in the world.
Then came the FlyDubai flight.
The flight’s landing in Israel was top news all over the world. CNN reported the event as a miraculous act of heroism. Even The Guardian, not known for its pro-Israel coverage of late, gushed about the “daring rescue.”
That may explain why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu moved so quickly to meet the returning passengers. Whatever one thinks of Netanyahu’s politics, his instincts for symbolism are unusually sharp. For a man far behind in the polls ahead of Oct. 27, it was a godsend. He understood the importance of attaching himself to bravery.
There is an old Israeli sensibility that can be difficult to explain to people who have never lived there. It combines self-confidence with improvisation, anxiety with humor and a stoicism before dire circumstances.
The Flydubai passengers offered a particularly vivid demonstration of that quality.
But there is a larger lesson here, although it is a modest one. Countries become caricatures when their people are reduced to the arguments surrounding them. Israelis have been seen increasingly through the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and sometimes through the actions of the government that happens to represent them. A plane full of passengers offers a different perspective.
They were scared. They were ordinary. They were resourceful. Some of them were brave. And the world was reminded of another side of Israel.
The post For a few terrifying minutes, Israelis were heroes again appeared first on The Forward.
