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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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Turning Point USA Disaffiliates Woman Who Verbally Attacked Jewish Students: Reports
Kaylee Mahoney, a University of Miami student and conservative influencer who verbally attacked Jewish students on campus on Jan. 27, 2026. Photo: Screenshot.
The Turning Point USA chapter of Miami, Florida, has reportedly fired a right-wing influencer and University of Miami student who upbraided Jewish peers in a tirade in which she denounced them as “disgusting” while accusing rabbis of eating infants.
“Christianity, which says love everyone, meanwhile your Bible says eating someone who is a non-Jew is like eating with an animal. That’s what the Talmud says,” the social media influencer, Kaylee Mahony, yelled at members of Students Supporting Israel (SSI) who had a table at a campus fair held at the University of Miami. “That’s what these people follow.”
She continued, “They think that if you are not a Jew you are an animal. That’s the Talmud. That’s the Talmud.”
The Talmud, a key source of Jewish law, tradition, and theology, is often misrepresented by antisemitic agitators in an effort to malign the Jewish people and their religion.
Mahony can also be heard in video of the incident, which took place on Tuesday, responding to one of the SSI members, saying, “Because you’re disgusting. It’s disgusting.”
Students told The Miami Hurricane newspaper that she further charged that “rabbis eat babies” during the altercation.
Mahony, who has more than 125,000 followers on TikTok, was the head of public relations for the university’s College Republicans club and the head of social media for Turning Point USA’s Miami chapter, according to her LinkedIn.
However, The Miami Hurricane reported that College Republicans terminated Mahony’s membership in the club. And now it appears that Turning Point (TPUSA) has taken a similar step.
According to StopAntisemitism, a nonprofit which tracks antisemitic incidents across the world, Mahony is “no longer affiliated” with the organization and is now being investigated by the university to determine whether her comments violated its code of conduct.
Laura Loomer, a conservative activist and self-described investigative journalist also reported that Mahony was “fired” by TPUSA.
After Tuesday’s incident, Mahony took to social media, where she posted, “Of course the most evil (((country))) in the world is filled with (((people))) who hate Jesus [sic].”
The “((()))” is used by neo-Nazis as a substitute for calling out Jews by name, which, given the context in which they discuss the Jewish people, could draw the intervention of a content moderator.
The confrontation highlights a growing divide within TPUSA over Israel and antisemitism in the aftermath of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who started the political advocacy organization.
Kirk was avidly pro-Israel and counseled conservative youth to avoid neo-Nazis and antisemitism, but a core of TPUSA’s demographic has embraced figures such as Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, both of whom have reprised medieval conspiracy theories about Jewish influence, perfidy, and libertinism.
Far-right activists have attempted to distort Kirk’s legacy since his death, with figures such as Tucker Carlson implying that he was murdered by “guys sitting around eating hummus” in Jerusalem and Owens suggesting Israel was behind his death. Meanwhile, Owens has suggested that Kirk’s widow, Erika, was a co-conspirator in her husband’s killing.
There has been no evidence to support such claims. Tyler Robinson, 22, has been charged for murdering Kirk and potentially faces the death penalty. He was romantically involved with his transgender roommate, and prosecutors have reportedly argued that Kirk’s anti-trans rhetoric was a key factor that allegedly led him to shoot the Turning Point USA founder.
Experts have argued that far-right efforts to distort Kirk’s stance on Israel and antisemitism are part of an effort to undermine not only the US-Israel alliance but Washington’s leadership in the world more broadly.
“It’s antisemitism for the purpose of undermining Americans’ confidence in ourselves and in our post-World War II role in the world,” Hudson Institute scholar Rebeccah Heinrichs said during a conference on antisemitism held in Washington, DC in December. “That is very dangerous because we can’t come to consensus on anything else we need from a grand strategy perspective if Americans scapegoat our problems to the Jews and if they believe that Israel is no longer an ally but it never was, and in fact that we were on the wrong side of World War II, which is now the narrative being pushed.”
Meanwhile, antisemitism is surging across the US.
Earlier this month, a 19-year-old suspect, Stephen Pittman, was arrested for allegedly igniting a catastrophic fire which decimated the Beth Israel Congregation synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi. According to court filings, he told US federal investigators that he targeted the building over its “Jewish ties.” Prior to that, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) published statistics showing an atmosphere of hate not experienced in the nearly 50 years since the organization began tracking such data in 1979.
The FBI has disclosed similar numbers, showing that even as hate crimes across the US decrease overall, those perpetrated against Jews continue to rise to record numbers. Jewish American groups have noted that this surge in antisemitic hate crimes, which included 178 assaults, is being experienced by a demographic group which constitutes just 2 percent of the US population.
Amid these convulsions in the US, as well as across the Western world, Jewish communities around the world continued to remember Kirk as a friend of both Israel and the Jewish people.
Last week, the State of Israel posthumously honored Kirk for his efforts to combat antisemitism at the 2026 International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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When Catherine O’Hara delivered the perfect Purim spiel
Catherine O’Hara, the SCTV star who rose to international fame in Home Alone and had a late career renaissance on Schitt’s Creek and on Apple TV+’s The Studio, has died at 71. The cause of death was not clear at press time.
O’Hara was an actor known for her versatility, convincing millions she could forget her son as she left for vacation (twice) and going on to play a series of eccentrics, like Moira Rose, the self-involved, delusional ex-soap opera star and mother of an interfaith on Schitt’s Creek, opposite her regular collaborator of decades, Eugene Levy.
While O’Hara may be best remembered for that show, for which she won a Golden Globe and an Emmy, or in the improvised mockumentaries of Christopher Guest, it was in a rare scripted film by Guest where she gave perhaps the most indelible Purimspiel in cinema history.
In 2006’s For Your Consideration, O’Hara plays veteran actress Marilyn Hack, cast in an awards-baity picture called Home for Purim. We get a glimpse of the film, a weepy melodrama set in the American South and starring Hack as a terminally ill matriarch.
Together the family joins with groggers to sing a tune that speaks of Achashverosh telling Esther “don’t farbrent” and rhymes it with “shep naches later in my tent.”
Of course the comedy here is that this film could have wide commercial appeal, and the premise that one would travel great distances to come home to observe Purim with the family as if it were Christmas (it’s later changed to Home for Thanksgiving).
After the family finishes singing the song, Hack in character, sounding like a Tennessee Williams matron, coughs ominously on cue into a napkin to signal her time is near.
“My time is short and I will not leave the Purim table,” Hack says as the hacking mother.
On request from her daughter — played by O’Hara’s frequent co-star Parker Posey — she then explains the significance of Purim to her brood.
“I’m an Esther, like the queen,” she says, wearing a glittering diadem. “She was a woman who came from the worst of times to the best. To a palace where she had everything she wanted. Comfort, riches, power. And she risked it all, including her life to serve a higher purpose, commit a selfless act to save a nation.”
O’Hara plays this to the just-believable-hilt, scored by an Itzhak Perlman-esque violin strain. When she asserts that “my selfless act was to protect my family from all the Hamans,” her kin spin their groggers and she loses it as only she could.
“I don’t have much time! Put your toys down!”
She then flips the story, realizing the irony that the Haman she was trying to protect her daughter from, turned out to be her. In what would have been the Oscar clip, the children dispute this: “You’re no Haman, Mama. You’re Queen Esther.”
Played for laughs, the scene — and indeed the premise of the film-within-a-film — was in some ways prescient, as Evangelicals increasingly look to Esther’s example.
A proof of O’Hara’s range is that, while making her mark in a Christmas film franchise, she could contribute perhaps the highest profile instance of Purim to the canon. That it wasn’t believable was the point, but the fact that she could so effortlessly embody an actor acting badly makes you think she could have sold the real thing.
The post When Catherine O’Hara delivered the perfect Purim spiel appeared first on The Forward.
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Iranian Jews caught between frustration and hope as US debates intervention
Over the past several weeks, Iranian American Jews have watched a historic uprising unfold in Iran. For many in the diaspora, the protests feel like a potential watershed moment for revolution in Iran. But alongside that hope is concern that the American conversation around Iran has been subsumed in domestic debates about American power abroad.
For Iranian Jews, this moment is sharpened by history. Most fled Iran during and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when social and political instability became widespread, Sharia law was imposed, and life for religious minorities fundamentally changed. The Jewish population, once estimated at around 100,000, has since dwindled to between 8,000 and 10,000. As Iranian Jewish human rights activist Marjan Keypour told the Forward, “the Jews in Iran were given a one-way ticket right out of the country.”
These protests have unlocked long dormant possibility that Jews might one day return to Iran — if not to live, then at least to visit on their own terms.
“Every Persian kid is asking their parents, ‘Where would you go first? If we go back to Iran, where will you take me?’” said Moji Pourmoradi, former assistant director of the High School at Temple Israel of Great Neck, a community that is home to one of the largest Persian Jewish populations in the country. “People haven’t asked those questions since they left. They were not allowed that hope.”
America First?
That newfound optimism makes the stakes of the uprising profound for Iranian Jews. “When I’m with my family, we talk about Iran every day,” said Tyler Moshfegh, a 21-year-old Iranian Jew from Los Angeles who still has relatives in the country. Recently, he said, those conversations have been marked by frustration over how many other anti-regime protest movements in Iran since 1979 have been crushed.
“Every time, the U.S. government says they’re going to support the people of Iran,” Moshfegh said, “and then it just gets thrown under the rug after a week.”
Iranian Jews had initially been buoyed by comments from President Donald Trump, who said in a Jan. 14 Truth Social post addressed to Iranian protesters, “KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!… HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” The U.S. moved major military assets to the Middle East this week, and threatened the use of force unless Iran agreed to a nuclear deal.
But in the time between the message and the military movement, thousands of protesters were reportedly killed by Iranian regime forces, giving some the impression that Trump’s shifting rhetoric had left the protesters defenseless. For them, allowing the regime to evade accountability for the mass killing of demonstrators in exchange for a nuclear deal does not go far enough.
“There are many people who are like, ‘Trump, you better not back down,’” said Rabbi Tarlan Rabizadeh, a vice president at American Jewish University and the daughter of Iranian immigrants. “We believed in you. If you do this, we’re never going to believe in you again. And you’re going to have blood on your hands.”
At the same time, some Iranian American Jews described feeling pressure to defend their concerns as calls grow on the American right to avoid foreign intervention altogether. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X that “President Trump threatening war and sending in troops to Iran is everything we voted against in ’24.”
Anna Hakakian, a community leader and president of the Babylonian Jewish Center Sisterhood in Great Neck, said, “The ‘staying out’ rhetoric feels like abandonment, especially when it translates into silence on human rights or appeasement of the regime.”
Rabizadeh said she struggles to understand how critics ignore the Iranian regime’s broader threat to the U.S. because it is the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism, funding groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.
“Forget about Israel,” she said. “What about the Houthis and all of the American ships they keep bombing?”
A deafening silence
Yet even more resistance to the idea of U.S. military action in Iran comes from Democrats — 79% of whom oppose intervention even if protesters are killed while demonstrating, compared to 53% of Republicans.
For Hakakian, the paucity of activism supporting the protesters revealed a double standard.
“Where are all the celebrities who speak loudly about human rights?” Hakakian said. “Where are the feminists? Where are the campus activists? It’s not west versus east, it’s not colonizer versus oppressed, so the suffering is ignored.”
That frustration has been compounded by antisemitic conspiracy theories circulating in some progressive spaces – including one shared by a Columbia University professor – claiming the protests in Iran were instigated by the Mossad to distract from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“In Great Neck, where many families have direct memories of persecution and exile, this framing seems dehumanizing, and it has an antisemitic undertone,” Hakakian said, adding, “It’s very much in line with what the regime narrates and what they want people to believe.”
On social media, some on the left have criticized the Iranian diaspora’s support for opposition figure Reza Pahlavi, who has been widely attacked for being pro-Israel. Pourmoradi said that Iranian Jews are frustrated by the refusal of those on the left who refuse to back U.S. intervention because they believe it is connected to promoting Israeli interests.
“Their ignorance isn’t just ignorance anymore. It’s detrimental. How many of those people that can’t back it have spoken to anybody who lived through it?” she said. “I think that most of my community feels the same way.”
Keypour said involving Israel in the conversation was a cheap way to dismiss the thousands of lives that had already been sacrificed in the Iranian people’s struggle for freedom.
“If we are mixing the conversation about Iran with Israel, Zionism, and Mossad,” said Keypour, “we discredit the agency of the Iranian people that they have exhibited so bravely.”
The post Iranian Jews caught between frustration and hope as US debates intervention appeared first on The Forward.