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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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Can the US really bring Iranians democracy?
The protesters at a January rally I attended in New York City’s Washington Square Park were loud and raw throated as they denounced the brutal Islamist regime in Tehran, then in the midst of slaughtering thousands of their comrades in Iran. A crowd of more than 1,500 called on the United States to make good on President Donald Trump’s all-caps promise that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”
I turned to an Iranian friend next to me who was lustily joining cheers calling for the tyrants’ overthrow. Like most of the rest of the protesters, she was also cheering the demonstration’s other prominent images: Israeli flags, the images of President Donald Trump and photos of Reza Pahlavi, the son and self-declared heir of the autocratic monarch Iranians ousted in 1979.
My friend’s parents had once been members of Iran’s leftist Tudeh Party, the country’s official communist faction, which was among the staunchest opponents of Pahlavi’s father. Recalling my own 20-month stay in Iran toward the end of his rule, I asked my friend if she understood the rampant corruption and repression under which Iranians lived during that time.
Was she aware of the role the U.S. played in installing the shah in power, and the torture of dissidents by SAVAK, the shah’s secret police, with support from Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad — a record Pahlavi has never acknowledged?
My dear friend fixed me in her gaze with clear eyes, devoid of illusion.
“Yes,” she said simply. “And it would be better.”
Lowered expectations
Whether the bombs and missiles the U.S. is now raining down on Iran will fulfill the promise Trump held out for protesters remains an open question. But In New York City, back in January, there was no mistaking their desperate faith in him — or the irony of that faith.
It was the U.S., after all, that joined with Great Britain in 1953 to overturn the democracy Iran enjoyed 73 years ago. Twenty-six years of U.S. support ensued for the autocracy that followed.
During the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988, it was the U.S. that also supplied Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, with critical intelligence and precursor chemicals that enabled him to manufacture and deploy outlawed chemical weapons against Iranian troops and civilians, asphyxiating thousands.
Given this history and the woeful fates that befell Iraq and Libya after U.S. intervention, many liberals voice grave doubt that any U.S.-forced regime change could restore democracy to the country. But they may be missing an important point: the extent to which crushing U.S. economic sanctions and the Iranian government’s own brutal repression, corruption and incompetence, have produced economic and political desperation among many Iranians, which radically lowers the bar.
The redemption of ‘Big Satan’
Opponents of Trump can recite a litany of his political and personal depravities, his affronts to democracy here at home, and his unreliability as an international partner in support of human rights and democracy abroad.
But I’ve noticed, anecdotally, that such recitations fall on deaf ears with many Iranians.
Two reasons rise to the top, in my mind, that explain this.
The first is the enormous credibility that Trump and the U.S. have derived from being among the primary hate targets of Iran’s despotic regime. This effect has also benefited Israel, the partner of the U.S. in waging this war. Decades of demonization of “the Big Satan” — and Israel, “the Little Satan” — from leaders so many Iranians despise have performed a miracle of reputational resurrection.
Today, this relentless drumbeat of vitriol has rendered the CIA’s subversion of Iran’s mid-20th century democracy — and Israel’s help in setting up SAVAK — a distant memory. This theocratic regime is the present danger.
Secondly, as a famous saying in Washington goes, “You can’t beat something with nothing.” That appears to be why many Iranians, for now, are turning to Trump. In Iran, the protesters’ own lack of leadership and resistance infrastructure plays into this. There is no Charles de Gaulle or Nelson Mandela waiting in the wings to take charge, with highly disciplined and battle-tested resistance groups to support them.
Another important factor may be the American left’s inability to offer Iranians a compelling alternative vision.
Several liberal members of Congress, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, have consistently praised the bravery of the protesters and their cause. But they have not proposed any way to hold their killers accountable, and have opposed Trump’s war as the way to do so. Their approach, diplomacy and international law, produced President Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2016, which radically constrained Iran’s nuclear weapons development.
Based on my reporting from Iran for the Forward back then, I can attest that vast numbers of Iranians strongly supported this at the time. They saw the JCPOA as a way to open Iran up to greater Western influence over time — the greatest fear of the country’s hardline ayatollahs.
But Trump tossed that achievement into the rubbish heap of history in his first term. And the left’s toolbox has been useless since. In the meantime, outside of government, some on the left have played down or ignored the Iranian government’s killings and abuses — or even attributed January’s protests in whole or part to Mossad agents embedded in Iran.
‘Striving for democracy’
Another friend, still living in Iran, told me recently that his grandson had left him feeling shamed. How is it, his grandson asked, that his generation had allowed the shah to be overthrown and replaced by this cohort of theocratic thugs?
My friend in Tehran had no answer.
My friend’s parents had been ardent supporters of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, the fiercely nationalistic Iranian leader ousted by Britain and the U.S. in 1953. But now, the prospect of a return by the shah’s son as a U.S.-backed autocrat with strong ties to right-wing Israelis didn’t phase him at all.
For his part, Pahlavi has publicly espoused a commitment to secular liberal democracy. But just last month his main support group, the National Union for Democracy in Iran, proposed that Pahlavi should serve as the unambiguous “Leader of the National Uprising” who will be empowered to issue official decrees, install hand-picked executive officials during a “transition to freedom and stability” and act as commander-in-chief of Iran’s military forces.
His supporters, meanwhile, have been widely accused of harassing and viciously threatening opponents who do not accept him in this role.
Would a secular, hopefully more competent, authoritarian dictatorship, whether led by Pahlavi or someone else with U.S. backing, be an improvement, I asked my friend in Tehran?
Even as bombs were falling from the sky onto his city last week, he texted back: “Yes sure!”
“I think this can be a phase towards a better situation for striving for democracy,” he added.
To be honest, I fear he and other like-minded Iranians are betting on moonbeams. But even after Israel bombed Tehran’s oil storage facilities over the weekend, engulfing the city in a poisonous black cloud, he texted me poetry.
“Under the black smoke…I saw trees that were hosting a multitude of blossoms with their thin bodies,” he wrote. “It seemed like they were supposed to remind us of spring….To us, who have been stuck in a rut for years? The ideological Mafia rule of the Islamic Republic of Iran has stolen 47 springs from us.”
The post Can the US really bring Iranians democracy? appeared first on The Forward.
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Lawsuit says DOGE used ChatGPT to flag Jewish-themed humanities grants as ‘DEI’ before canceling them
(JTA) — The Department of Government Efficiency tagged Jewish themes as “DEI” in ChatGPT when searching for federal humanities grants to cancel last year, according to a class-action lawsuit.
The methodology contributed to the cancellation of National Endowment for the Humanities grants to study violence against women during the Holocaust, postwar Soviet Jewish literature and hundreds of other topics, even as the NEH would soon bestow $10.4 million, its largest-ever grant, to the Tikvah Fund, a politically conservative Jewish cultural project.
The suit brought by the Authors Guild; a member organization for several academic groups including the Association for Jewish Studies; and a number of individual scholars seeks to restore the canceled funding, which comprised around 80% of the NEH’s grants and was cut amid the Elon Musk-led task force’s broader slashing of federal spending last year.
The suit names the NEH, its acting chair, and several DOGE staffers as defendants, including Justin Fox, who the suit alleges was behind the ChatGPT methodology.
While DOGE’s use of keywords to cancel research grants was already known, as was the sweep’s effect on Jewish projects, the suit has revealed new details in its methodology, including staffers’ use of ChatGPT and their contention that works dealing with Judaism are a form of DEI.
In a filing on Friday, attorneys for the plaintiffs said Fox specified that he considered Jewish grants, including those focusing on the Holocaust, part of DEI.
“For a different grant about violence against women during the Holocaust, Fox testified that ChatGPT properly classified the grants as involving DEI, and thus slated it for termination, because it was ‘specifically focused on Jewish cultures’ (as in, it was about the Holocaust) and the ‘voices of the females in that culture,’” reads the filing.
“More generally, Fox stated that he identified as DEI any grant about a specific ‘minority group,’ meaning any particular ‘ethnicity, culture . . . race or gender or religion,’” the filing went on.
“It’s a Jewish — specifically focused on Jewish culture and amplifying the marginalized voices of the females in that culture,” Fox stated about one canceled grant for a project about “violence against women during the Holocaust,” as the latest court filing described it. Fox continued, “It’s inherently related to DEI for that reason.”
When asked in a deposition about the criteria for cancellation, the NEH’s acting chair Michael McDonald said he hadn’t known that DOGE used ChatGPT in its selection process, while also noting that he didn’t agree with the assessment that the Holocaust constituted DEI. The final authority for canceling the grants rested with DOGE, not McDonald, depositions indicated.
Fox, the suit alleges, had created his own “Detection List” of identity-based traits, with separate categories for “Craziest Grants” and “Other Bad Grants,” before running the databases through the generative AI software.
His prompt, according to the lawsuit: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response.” The grants that turned up were all terminated, with only a few exceptions.
Many Jewish-themed projects were among the NEH cancellations, including a grant for “In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union,” a translation project that was published in book form last month. The book was singled out during the lawsuit’s discovery phase, which noted, “ChatGPT classified this grant as DEI because ‘[t]his anthology explores Jewish writers’ engagement with the Holocaust in the USSR.’”
“I find it annoyingly amusing that they weren’t bothering to read the grants themselves — that they needed a machine to give them some sense,” Sasha Senderovich, a University of Washington professor who co-translated the volume with University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign professor Harriet Murav, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Three-quarters of their NEH grant had already been paid out, Senderovich said. He believes the NEH’s decision to cancel his grant was an example of “authoritarian logic.”
The book “In the Shadow of the Holocaust” showcases Jewish literature written in the Soviet Union; at right, Jewish women buy flour before Passover in Moscow in 1965. (Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)After Senderovich used similar language in a Forward story last year following the cuts, an NEH official called the accusation “tendentious” and accused “wokeness and intersectionality” of being the true authoritarians in a text to McDonald, according to the court filing.
While the DEI justification has generated headlines, Senderovich said, “I think it’s also somewhat misleading to get hung up on what they typed into ChatGPT.”
The NEH’s final grant cancellation list, he noted, included many projects that had not been flagged as DEI. One such cancellation noted by the plaintiffs’ attorneys — which DOGE canceled over McDonald’s objections — was “a grant to advance the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill [sic] University.”
Murav, for her part, told JTA, “I am reeling from these cascading waves of hatred.” She rejected the idea that Jews should be considered part of DEI: “DEI initiatives seek to redress historic failures in American society. DEI efforts in the world of the university are not aimed at American Jews, because American Jews are over-represented in the professions and in the academy.”
Also canceled by DOGE: a project on “the untold story of Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust,” according to the suit. Documentary filmmaker Marisa Fox, whose own grant for a project matching that description was canceled, bemoaned the Trump administration’s new priorities in the Hollywood Reporter last year.
“I’ve seen firsthand how meeting a Holocaust survivor, whether in person or through a project, can dispel the most deep-seated antisemitic beliefs,” Fox — no apparent relation to the DOGE staffer — wrote then. “But if the NEH, NEA and local humanities councils are defunded, the platforms that can bridge divides will be severely limited. And so, too, will our chances of stemming hate’s rising tide.”
Even as staffers appeared to classify Jews as “DEI,” the NEH is moving forward with its support of Tikvah-aligned Jewish scholars. Ruth Wisse, a prominent Yiddish and Jewish cultural scholar, emeritus Harvard professor and senior fellow at Tikvah, is set to deliver the NEH’s annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities later this month at what has been rechristened the “Trump Kennedy Center.” Wisse’s lecture is titled “A Message from the ‘Blue and White’ in the ‘Red, White, and Blue,’” a reference to the colors of the Israeli and American flags.
A request for comment to Tikvah CEO Eric Cohen was not returned as of press time. Tikvah had a previously unreported connection to NEH senior leadership, the deposition shows: Dorothea Wolfson, who has worked with Tikvah and directs a program established by a former Tikvah board chair, is married to Adam Wolfson, the NEH’s assistant chair for programs. Adam Wolfson said in the deposition that he had made introductions but wasn’t involved in the grant selection.
As it shines a spotlight on DOGE’s practices, the suit also brings a different long-simmering debate to the forefront: whether Jews are considered part of “DEI,” the broad suite of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at universities and other institutions that conservatives have railed against.
Some prominent Jewish voices, including current CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, have argued that DEI practices are at least latently antisemitic because their practitioners do not consider Jews an underrepresented minority. The Trump administration’s crackdown on campus antisemitism has frequently been paired with anti-DEI initiatives.
Yet at the same time, a broader anti-DEI push on the right has also ensnared Jewish projects, or generated confusion among university administrators as to whether Jewish events should be canceled on campuses where DEI is outlawed.
Fox, according to investigations of DOGE staffers last year, is a former investment banker whose DOGE tenure also included stints overseeing cuts at USAID and the General Services Administration. His NEH tenure coincided with a directive for that organization to eliminate $175 million in federal grant funding. The DOGE project largely wound down following its architect Musk’s official exit from government a few months into its tenure, decimating numerous federal agencies and jeopardizing some initiatives to benefit Jews.
“It’s just ridiculous. You have these kids being told just go in and cut as much as you can,” Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Author’s Guild, told JTA about the DOGE maneuvers. “They were given no real instruction.”
The guild is one of several organizations that have co-signed onto the lawsuit, which is requesting the refunding of the grants. It is now awaiting a judge’s ruling on a summary judgment that would avoid a trial.
Among several individual authors represented by the guild in the suit is Jewish author and independent scholar William Goldstein, founding editor of the New York Times’ Books website, whose NEH grant was meant to fund a biography of Jewish LGBTQ playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer.
The post Lawsuit says DOGE used ChatGPT to flag Jewish-themed humanities grants as ‘DEI’ before canceling them appeared first on The Forward.
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Lindsey Graham urges Israel not to strike Iranian oil depots even as he says he helped make war happen
(JTA) — Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has called on Israel to rein in its attacks on Iranian oil infrastructure, marking a rare note of caution from a Republican lawmaker who has said he helped push the United States to join Israel in waging war against Iran.
In a post on X on Sunday, Graham praised Israel for its role in the war before adding that “there will be a day soon that the Iranian people will be in charge of their own fate, not the murderous ayatollah’s regime.”
“In that regard, please be cautious about what targets you select,” continued Graham. “Our goal is to liberate the Iranian people in a fashion that does not cripple their chance to start a new and better life when this regime collapses. The oil economy of Iran will be essential to that endeavor.”
Graham’s post linked to an Axios article that reported that the United States was alarmed by Israeli strikes over the weekend that targeted 30 Iranian fuel depots. On Monday, U.S. gas prices rose to their highest levels since 2024.
The warning from Graham, an ally of President Donald Trump and staunch supporter of Israel, comes days after the Republican hawk told the Wall Street Journal that he had played a key role in urging Trump to strike Iran.
Prior to the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, Graham made several trips to Israel where he met with members of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whom he said he coached on how to lobby Trump to strike Iran.
“They’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me,” Graham told the newspaper.
On Monday, Graham also directed his criticism at Saudi Arabia’s decision to stay on the sidelines of the campaign against Iran.
“It is my understanding the Kingdom refuses to use their capable military as a part of an effort to end the barbaric and terrorist Iranian regime who has terrorized the region and killed 7 Americans,” wrote Graham in a post on X Monday. “Question – why should America do a defense agreement with a country like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that is unwilling to join a fight of mutual interest?”
The post Lindsey Graham urges Israel not to strike Iranian oil depots even as he says he helped make war happen appeared first on The Forward.