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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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My hopes for the rabbi who envisions my defeat — and for a better Jewish future
Dear Rabbi Cosgrove,
Thank you for your letter this week. Although you envision my electoral defeat two years from now, I recognize that it comes from a place of genuine concern, for me and for our shared future.
While your letter imagines my political fate, I think it’s really the future of the Jewish community that’s at stake. I know you care about the safety and thriving of Jews in New York City and beyond — so do I. We just have different ideas about how best to achieve it.
Two thousand years ago, Hillel prescribed us a challenge, in two questions: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am for myself only, what am I?”
You believe that I am falling short on the first of Hillel’s questions. In our tradition of tokhecha, of accountability, I’ll sit with your criticism and take it seriously. I fight fiercely to keep our people safe, here in New York City, across the United States, and in Israel. I urged Mayor Zohran Mamdani to keep Jessica Tisch as NYPD Commissioner; to discourage the use of phrases like “globalize the intifada”; and to increase funding to combat antisemitism and other forms of hate. I’m pleased he’s done those things, and I’ll keep pushing for more.
I believe in the vision of a Jewish and democratic Israel, as imagined in its Declaration of Independence. I just don’t believe there can be democracy with occupation, or that Israel’s present actions in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon are consistent with that vision. On Election Night, I spoke about Israelis who provide protective presence in the West Bank, putting their lives on the line to help protect Palestinian neighbors from settler terrorism, as heroes whose courage I hope to emulate. And I pleaded with people not to use “Zionist” as a slur.
But even if I were an anti-Zionist, I would still be deeply within Jewish tradition and values.
My son is named after Marek Edelman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and a Bundist (Jewish democratic socialist) who was not a Zionist. Albert Einstein and Judah Magnes, a leading American rabbi who moved to Israel in 1922, both worried presciently about the dangers of sovereignty in a “Jewish state” and preferred to imagine a bi-national one. Many Jews are rediscovering those traditions, and concluding that they fit better with the Jewish values they learned in Hebrew school.
Your efforts to define them, and me, outside the Jewish community, are dangerously short-sighted. Jews are not made safer by proscribing a particular vision of Israel as the price of full belonging, or by insisting on unconditional support for Israel while it commits human rights violations against Palestinians.
Like the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, Israeli-American historian and eminent Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov, and the Lemkin Institute — the legacy of the Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor who developed the term — I believe with great sadness that Israel’s destruction of Gaza meets the definition of genocide. But whether one uses the term or not, surely we can agree that the scale of Palestinian death and suffering should trouble every Jew. Our obligation is not to ignore it, or explain it away, but to reckon with it — and to change it.
You recently urged candidates for office seeking the Jewish community’s support to march in the Israel Day Parade. But if representing Jewish New Yorkers requires marching alongside Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, perhaps we should ask whether we’ve confused loyalty with moral leadership.
I believe that we need more attention to Hillel’s second question. Our tradition asks us never to become indifferent to the suffering of children. I cannot reconcile Israel’s killing of thousands of Palestinian children with the Judaism that shaped me — most deeply, with the idea that every one of them was created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, just like my kids.
The future you imagine presumes that the greatest danger facing Jewish life is that Jews will leave Zionism. But it seems to me the real danger is that young Jews will conclude there is no room for them inside Jewish institutions unless they silence their conscience. A community cannot thrive if the choices it offers the next generation are hypocrisy or excommunication.
At the end of your letter, you welcome me “back,” presumably to a position of always defending Israel against its critics, insisting that Zionism is an essential part of every Jewish identity and refusing to be in political coalition with people who disagree.
I’d like to invite you forward, to a belief in shared safety, where we don’t compromise on anyone’s humanity.
Or, at least, I’d like to invite us together to attempt a more productive conversation, to continue a debate that Jews have been having for at least 2,600 years. You recently called for Jews “to avoid the reductive and destructive tactic of labeling people with whom we disagree either as self-hating Jews or colonialist aggressors.” Let’s model that together.
Our differing points of view represent a longstanding debate amongst our people about the best way to achieve safety and flourishing, for ourselves and our neighbors. There’s room to keep that debate going — through conversation and dialogue, not through exclusion and shaming.
The door is open, rabbi. Welcome forward.
The post My hopes for the rabbi who envisions my defeat — and for a better Jewish future appeared first on The Forward.
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After 4 years and a stubborn leak, a landmark mikveh is finally whole again
Unveiled in the suburbs of Boston more than two decades ago, the Jewish ritual bathhouse known as Mayyim Hayyim offers an intimate space for people of all genders to mark life’s transitions. The facility’s pair of pools beckoned thousands from miles around, effectively reinventing the ancient Jewish practice of mikveh immersion for the modern era.
Then one of the tubs sprung a leak that took more than an ordinary plumber to fix. Now, more than four years later, the mikveh itself has had a rebirth, with the reopening of the immersion pool on the building’s left side, restoring a source of strength in suburban Boston that has become a pillar of American Jewish life.
“It felt like we were cut off from a really important part of our space and our connectedness,” said Sarah Quiat, a mikveh guide at Mayyim Hayyim who has been guiding immersions for seven years. “Being able to give the immersee the option of the left pool in and of itself feels like a core part of how Mayyim Hayyim approaches mikveh. To be able to offer and facilitate the immersion that a person is looking for comes down even to the details of which pool is calling to you.”
Tucked into a butter-yellow, 19th-Century New-England-style home in Newton, Mass., Mayyim Hayyim, Hebrew for “living waters,” grew out of a vision developed by author Anita Diamant and collaborators affectionately known as the “Mikveh Mamas.”
The founders grounded Mayyim Hayyim in a desire to enrich ancient ritual with contemporary life and make it accessible to Jews of all identities and types of observance.
Since ancient times, traditional Judaism has called for married women to immerse themselves in a mikveh after their menstrual period or childbirth before resuming sexual relations with their husbands. In the 1970s, as the Jewish feminist movement began picking up speed, thought leaders including Diamant looked beyond the patriarchal origins of mikveh and sought to reimagine and reclaim it.
“We, as a Jewish community, had to do better,” Diamant said in an interview. “We needed a mikveh where everyone who entered felt welcomed and valued.”
Today, Mayyim Hayyim offers a wide range of non-traditional immersion ceremonies — including for gender transition milestones, survivors of domestic violence or abuse, or individuals recovering from long-term illness — in addition to more conventional ceremonies for occasions like b’nei mitzvahs, the High Holy Days, and conversions.
The pool’s restoration was made possible by a joint gift last year from Mikhveh Mama, Paula Brody, and her husband, Merrill Hassenfeld.
For their 20th wedding anniversary in 2004, the couple immersed in the waters on the house’s left-hand side.
But in February 2022, that pool sprung a leak, and the water level began declining at a rate of more than one inch per day. A leak of such magnitude rendered the pool not Kosher by halachic standards, forcing the organization to close the pool until further notice.
Contractors began work to diagnose the source of the leak. Then came another setback — the particularly frigid Boston winter of 2023. Burst pipes caused a major flood in the building. Now other repairs to the building had to be prioritized.
Brody and Hassenfeld had not been aware that the mikveh where they marked their 20 years of marriage was out of commission. Together, they donated the money to finance the restoration ahead of their 42nd anniversary on June 24.
Since then, members of an adult B’Mitzvah class from a local temple have sought the waters of the mikveh and, during Pride Month in June, Mayyim Hayyim and Keshet, an advocacy group for LGBTQ+ Jews, hosted an evening of affirming immersions for the queer community.
“It was always envisioned with the two pools,” Brody recalled. “When I realized that it had been dysfunctional, we really wanted to help.”
“It enables Mayyim Hayyim to be whole again,” she added.
Mia Peloquin traveled from Connecticut to immerse themself at Mayyim Hayyim last year to mark their conversion. In August, they will return with their friend who converted a year earlier. The pair will celebrate their conversion anniversaries together.
“I was actually surprised that the left pool was open,” Peloquin said. “We thought we would have to go in one after another, which would extend our trip in Massachusetts a bit longer, but finding out that the left pool was open was very exciting for us because we get to immerse at the same time.”
During the closure, the organization has been guiding immersions solely using the pool on the right side of the building. Even with one operational pool, more than 900 people visit Mayyim Hayyim for roughly 1,600 immersions annually, many hailing from the surrounding Boston area, while others plan international travel to experience the one-of-a-kind space.
In addition to increasing the organization’s capacity for immersions, having both pools back to full functionality allows for expanded partnerships with Jewish institutions.
Beginning in 2023, then-Brandeis student and Hillel Tfilah Coordinator Zac Gondelman saw the power of ritual immersion and identified a critical education gap on the subject among his peers.
“Reform Jews came into Brandeis feeling like there was a world of Jewish ritual and practice that they had never heard of or accessed or lived in,” he said. “And so, I thought there was no better way to bridge those things than to bring a whole bunch of college kids to the mikveh.”
Despite Mayyim Hayyim’s decreased capacity at the time, Gondelman helped organize an annual trip for Brandeis students each year ahead of the High Holidays. With the second pool now open, more students can participate.
Harvard Hillel recently organized a trip to the mikveh for graduating seniors to mark the completion of college.
Engaging with the community through the mikveh has long been central to Diamant’s founding vision for the space. In doing so, Mayyim Hayyim has helped the ritual expand and grow, and even interact with other ancient practices. In 2024, the North Shore Hevra, a Boston-based community of Jews seeking to revive Jewish death and burial rituals called tahara, began working with Mayyim Hayyim to offer mikveh immersions for its tahara leaders.
Linda Goodspeed, cofounder of North Shore Hevra, said a shared passion for breathing contemporary life into ancient practice helped forge a relationship between the two organizations. Now, tahara volunteers can receive a newly created immersion blessing before the High Holidays, one adapted ancient practice to prepare for another.
“They were really our mentors,” Goodspeed added.
That mentorship extends far beyond Boston. Through the Rising Tide Open Waters Mikveh Network, 39 facilities in the U.S. and an additional nine internationally draw on Mayyim Hayyim’s extensive training resources to prepare their guides to serve the local community and foster mikvehs around the world.
Rabbi Miriam Berger, founder of Wellspring, another pluralistic mikveh in the network located in London, England, considers Mayyim Hayyim to be “the mothership.”
“Judaism gifted us mikveh,” she said. “Mayyim Hayyim gifted it back to us.”
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‘There’s nothing I can say to her’: Boulder attack survivors have words on antisemitism for Congressional nominee Melat Kiros
For Natalya Reznik and Ed Victor, Tuesday’s primary victory of Melat Kiros, now a Democratic congressional nominee for much of Denver, cut deep and took them back to the horrific first day in June 2025 when they attended an 18-minute protest walk to call for the release of hostages taken from Israel into Gaza on Oct. 7.
That day, Reznik, 54, and her husband carried posters of hostages Lior Rudaeff and Yair Yaakov whose bodies were later returned. As always, the mostly Jewish group of 28 walked quietly, letting their signs do the talking.
“Since 10/7 I was devastated. I expected people everywhere, not just in America, to take to the streets to put pressure on Hamas to release the hostages,” said Reznik who came to the U.S. 30 years ago from St. Petersburg, Russia “I was so naive — I really thought this was so horrific that it just couldn’t go unnoticed. But what I saw was the opposite — people took to the streets to protest Israel.”
Reznik didn’t hear a man shouting “Free Palestine” — others did — before she noticed her feet getting hot. She looked down to find much of her lower body on fire, likely from a Molotov cocktail. She rolled over on the grass to put them out. Another woman, Karen Diamond, was engulfed in flames.
Dressed up as a gardener so as not to be noticed in the park outside the Boulder County Courthouse, the attacker, Mohamed Soliman, 46, later told prosecutors he had researched “Zionist” events in the area.
But when a news anchor ahead of the primary asked Kiros whether the attack had been antisemitic, the former lawyer turned doctoral candidate drew a distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. She tried to make the case that no one could presume Soliman’s motive.
“I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator,” Kiros told a local Colorado station last month. “All I know is that he attacked innocent people because of what they might have believed. And I don’t even know what the people that were at that protest believed, too. In fact most of them were probably just there to ask that the people who were kidnapped on Oct. 7 be returned to their families.”
That logic found little purchase with Ed Victor, a resident of Louisville, Colorado, who had also been at the Boulder courthouse that day.
“You don’t have to look at his heart,” Victor said. “You can look at his actions.”
Soliman pleaded guilty to more than 100 felony charges in state court but not guilty to hate crime charges. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The success of Kiros, 29, a Democratic Socialist of America in her first run for public office, echoed the victories of DSA-backed candidates Darializa Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York, who similarly drew a line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Like those candidates, Kiros has advocated for one state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians.
Reznik does not live in the deep-blue district Kiros will be favored to win in November, which represents the largest Jewish community in Colorado. But she said Kiros’ victory was the result of a callousness toward Jewish people that now defines the attitude of the general public.
“It’s an uncomfortable feeling,” said Reznik, a Russian Jewish immigrant. “This is not the country I came to 30 years ago. I no longer feel that people in Congress even hold the same values that I do.”
Reznik’s burns from the attack that day covered 40% of her legs and left arm. She spent one week in intensive care and another in the hospital recovering from surgery. It was in the ICU that she first encountered people online trying to downplay the attack as anti-Zionist rather than antisemitic – a discourse that seemed to legitimize violence against Jews and continued to unfold in the hours and days after the firebombing.
“They’re encouraging people who are antisemites, who are simply scum, to feel as political activists,” Reznik said. “They speak the language of the murderers.”
Kiros’ equivocating comments ahead of Tuesday’s primary divided Denver Jews, with one rabbi who described herself as a “liberal Jew” writing in the Denver Post that Kiros’ candidacy “scared her.” Another Jewish writer defended Kiros, arguing that the candidate’s criticism is directed at the Israeli government and military, not the Jewish people.
In an interview on CNN the day after her primary win, Kiros tried to allay fears, adding that the “conflation of the actions of the state of Israel and the Jewish people … is putting them at greater risk.”
“My commitment is to protecting the sanctity of human life and dignity and that includes combating the hate and the rising antisemitism that we are seeing,” she said.
But for the survivors of that day’s attack who heard Kiros’ equivocation ahead of the primary, it was hard not to feel fear – and fury. Reznik saw Kiros’ refusal to call the attack antisemitic as the height of hypocrisy.
“There’s nothing I can say to her,” she said, “because I know she’s one of the people who’s not listening.”
The post ‘There’s nothing I can say to her’: Boulder attack survivors have words on antisemitism for Congressional nominee Melat Kiros appeared first on The Forward.
