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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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How a Jewish, German-averse writer came to love Berlin
Berlin Before and After: A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times
By Wendy Lesser
Harper, 352 pages, $32
For years, Wendy Lesser was a proud, Germany-avoiding Jew with what she calls “an ingrained distaste for the nation that gave rise to the Third Reich.” Then, in 2003, Lesser, founder and editor of The Threepenny Review and a prolific critic and author, was the recipient of a fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. Those few months in residence started her love affair with that history-embattled city, where she now returns regularly and feels surprisingly at home.
“One of the things I discovered, when I eventually got to Berlin,” she writes in her latest book, Berlin Before and After, “was how deeply Jewish that city’s culture still is. Or…how thoroughly the German and Jewish cultures at one time entered into each other, so that the versions we now have of them…are still colored by that mutual infusion.”
Berlin Before and After is Lesser’s highly idiosyncratic, selective take on the city — as much travelogue as cultural history. Its subtitle, A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times, evoking the civil rights abuses of the Trump era, reveals something of its raison-d’être. But Lesser doesn’t belabor the comparison, by now a cliché of American political discourse. She is at least as interested in the diverse artistic pleasures of contemporary Berlin as in the historical shadows that shape its landscape and personality.
The conceit of the book is simple: Lesser begins with an admiring look at Berlin in the year 1929, which she defines as “the last year in which it was possible to turn a blind eye” to impending disaster. “Runaway inflation, widespread economic despair, and violent social unrest were just around the corner,” she writes, “but they were invisible to most people.”
Lesser skips over the rise of the Third Reich, the Holocaust and the devastation of World War II and resumes her narrative in the contemporary city, with its wealth of museums, memorials and other cultural attractions. An aficionado of Berlin’s public transit, she ends, somewhat bizarrely, by taking readers on an extended bus ride across the city.
Some of the greatest achievements of the Weimar period, she argues, date to 1929. Lesser proceeds chronologically but also associatively, touching on architectural treatises, novels (including Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel), and the photography, paintings, silent film, dance and theater of the era. Though her focus isn’t political, she lauds the achievements of chancellor and, later, foreign minister Gustav Stresemann. She also remarks on the celebrity of Albert Einstein, one of the many German Jewish scientists and intellectuals who eventually found refuge in the United States.
In the section “Berlin Now,” Lesser is concerned with the impacts of two separate, but related traumas: the Nazi era and the Cold War, epitomized by the Berlin Wall dividing the city into east and west. Berlin’s intense memorial landscape has by now been the subject of countless articles and books, but that doesn’t impede Lesser from digging in. “Berlin is the companion who never shuts up, and what it wants to tell you about is itself,” she writes. The city “lives on a daily basis with its history in a way that is true of no other place I know.”
Lesser is right on the big picture. But her patience for dissection of both the history and its memorialization is limited. She rushes through the Topography of Terror museum (admittedly, a heavy lift), built on the site of Gestapo and SS headquarters and the Reich Security Main Office. She has little to say about the German Resistance Memorial Center, another site-specific museum, located in the military headquarters where the failed July 20, 1944, assassination plot against Adolf Hitler was planned. And she contemptuously dismisses what she calls “the self-glorifying architecture” of Daniel Libeskind’s generally acclaimed Jewish Museum Berlin in a single paragraph, without any reference to the many important shows it has mounted over the years or to its revamped (in 2020) core exhibition.
Nor does Lesser explicitly consider the notion of the “counter-memorial” — those self-effacing monuments that serve as a critique of more conventional, celebratory memorials. She nevertheless describes several of them. Among the earliest is Bibliothek, the underground “empty library” memorial on Bebelplatz, commemorating the 1933 book burnings that took place there. She visits Peter Eisenman’s vast, unmissable (and controversial) Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, but makes no mention of its excellent underground museum. She examines the now ubiquitous Stolpersteine (Stumble-Stones), recording the last known residences, deportation dates and fates of Berlin’s Jewish residents, and Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock’s Places of Remembrance, whose playful signs attached to lampposts catalog the plethora of anti-Jewish ordinances enacted by the Third Reich.
She also covers memorials to Germany’s division, including remnants of the Wall, the Stasi Museum, the Spandau Zitadelle (with its collection of “toxic monuments”) and the gruesome Hohenschönhausen Prison, whose brutal past clearly captures her imagination.
Berlin’s greatest draw for Lesser is arguably its culture, though it, too, is inseparable from history. She delves into the art of Gerhard Richter, the music of the Russian-born conductor Vladimir Jurowski, the television series Babylon Berlin, and the literature and film of East Germany.
The resulting narrative is an intellectual potpourri, probably most engaging to those who know Berlin (but not too well) or who might be contemplating a visit. Lesser follows her own wide-ranging curiosity and assumes that we’ll tag along. “Viscerally and consciously, with a kind of self-awareness that is rare in a collective entity,” she writes, radiating enthusiasm, “Berlin has continued to reveal itself to me in ways I never cease to find moving.”
The post How a Jewish, German-averse writer came to love Berlin appeared first on The Forward.
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What Black voters can teach Michigan Jews about Abdul El-Sayed
Jewish Democrats in Michigan face a tough choice. They can vote for Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate whose views clash with their own, or withhold their support for the Democratic candidate for senator in a razor-close election that may determine which party controls the Senate.
In a race where a single percentage point separates the two candidates, and in which Jews make up 1.4% of the electorate, every Jewish vote counts. That’s why it’s instructive to look at the history of another minority voting bloc — Black Americans.
Black Americans have faced a version of the El-Sayed dilemma for a century: Should they support a candidate who is imperfect or even hostile on issues they care about intensely, or hold their noses, be pragmatic and vote for the larger prize of institutional power?
Black Americans “don’t have the luxury of picking a candidate who is purely for their interests,” Sam Fulwood III, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who specializes in race and public policy, told me in a phone interview. “I don’t think there’s ever been a moment in history where there’s been a pure choice.”
I get why so many Michigan Jewish voters see El-Sayed as the ultimate “impure” choice. He said he’d cut off both offensive and even defensive military aid to Israel. He called the Israeli government evil, comparing it to Hamas. He has campaigned with Hasan Piker, the influencer who called Israel “the Jewish ISIS” and said that American Jews bring violence on themselves by supporting Israel.
Amid a storm of criticism and calls to distance himself from Piker, El-Sayed reiterated his support for Jews. “I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people,” he said.
At the same time, El-Sayed’s progressive stances on health care, education and economic justice and even his sharp criticism of the Israeli government have resonated with some Jewish voters.
Others have been satisfied by his pledges to fight antisemitism and his call for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that, in his words, guarantees equal rights “for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike.”
“So many young Jewish people are active in Abdul’s campaign, and it’s their Judaism that leads them to that position,” said former U.S. Rep. Andy Levin, a self-described Zionist.
Many Michigan Jewish Democrats remain unconvinced. Just before the High Holidays, dozens of Michigan rabbis and Jewish leaders signed onto a list of “non-negotiable” principles about Jewish safety and Israel that any candidate hoping to earn their support must espouse. The petition, called Non-Negotiable Michigan, didn’t name El-Sayed directly, but it’s clear he was its target.
Ultimatums cut both ways. In setting terms for El-Sayed Jewish leaders have created one for themselves. Elections, despite what we learned in high school, aren’t popularity contests. A vote isn’t an approval. It’s a choice.
The Democratic Jews on the fence over El-Sayed may ultimately be faced, come November, with the prospect of an imperfect candidate representing a wing of the party they fear, versus two more years of a Republican majority that will continue to rubber-stamp the Trump administration’s damage to the economy, democracy, the environment, the social safety net, health care and immigrant rights.
If the choice is novel for many Jewish Democrats, it’s old news for Black Americans.
The dilemma goes back at least as far as the 1936 election, when Black voters shifted to the Democratic Party to vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt, even though FDR, fearful of losing Southern support, repeatedly refused to support federal anti-lynching legislation.
Or consider Lyndon Johnson. In 1957, Johnson, then Senate Majority Leader, stripped the enforcement teeth out of that year’s Civil Rights Act to get it passed, bypassing the objections of civil rights leaders. Seven years later, after Johnson became president and signed the Civil Rights Act, Black voters delivered him about 94% of their vote — despite a legislative record on civil rights that had been mixed at best.
Even more recently, Black voters have had to sacrifice the perfect for the good, supporting Hillary Clinton despite the impact of Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill that contributed to mass incarceration.
In all these cases, Black voters didn’t overlook or excuse these records. Instead, they made a strategic calculation to focus on the bigger goals, realizing politicians are often imperfect vehicles to get us there.
“Black Democrats have overlooked differences in the Democratic Party and even overlooked prejudice because they knew the Democratic Party was much better than the alternative,” Ada Horwich, a longtime Democratic Jewish activist in Los Angeles told me. “We need to learn from their political behavior.”
Perhaps the best example, Fulwood reminded me, was John F. Kennedy, who saw the civil rights movement as a domestic distraction. But in 1960, after Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed, Kennedy privately — so as not to offend Southern Democrats — called Coretta Scott King to offer support, while his brother Robert worked behind the scenes to secure King’s release. That persuaded King’s father, King Sr., to throw his considerable electoral influence behind the Democrat.
“He took a lot of Black voters with him,” said Fulwood, “even though Kennedy was not great.”
Fast-forward to 1963, and JFK came around to support the movement.
“It’s a difficult thing,” King Jr. said at the time, “to teach a president.”
One lesson is that politicians are teachable. Stances that seem “non-negotiable” now can change.
That mixture of cold calculation and hope is exactly what this election is asking Jewish Michiganders to negotiate. Or, as Fulwood said of so many electoral choices Black Americans have faced, “One candidate is very bad, and one is less bad.”
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South Florida Democrat Moskowitz airs campaign ad targeting antisemitism with concentration camp footage
(JTA) — South Florida U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz pulled on his family’s story as Jews in the Holocaust in a campaign ad targeting antisemitism, as he strives to retain his seat in the November general election.
“In every generation, they rise against us,” the Jewish incumbent says in the ad over a background of somber music and black-and-white photos from a concentration camp. “My great-grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz.”
“In our generation, right here, the Parkland shooter had swastikas carved into his gun,” he continues, standing in front of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, referring to the 2018 fatal shooting that killed 14 students and three educators.
Moskowitz, a top Democratic supporter of Israel in Congress, who fended off progressive challenger Oliver Larkin in a heated August primary, emphasizes in the ad that he has worked to fight antisemitism through bipartisan laws. Some of this legislative action has involved increasing security at synagogues and Jewish nonprofits and expanding education to reduce hate crimes.
“Never again is now,” Moskowitz concludes.
Moskowitz won the August primary with 63.5% of Democratic voter support, to Larkin’s 36.5%. But Larkin was vocal throughout the race about his opposition to arms sales to Israel, going so far as to label the country as a “religious supremacist” nation.
As Moskowitz prepares to face former Boca Raton Mayor Scott Singer, a Republican who is also Jewish, the Democrat may be facing a tight race in a region that had previously been solidly blue.
The 25th Congressional District, which includes parts of Delray Beach, Boca Raton and Miami Beach, is about 25% Jewish, according to local estimates.
Yet recent redistricting efforts have transformed the region into territory that President Donald Trump would have likely won in the 2024 elections. In fact, the Cook Political Report declared a shift from “solid D” to “toss up.”
“There’s no doubt that the race for the new 25th District will be highly competitive in a favorable environment for Democrats,” the report stated.
Moskowitz’s team emphasized the “deeply personal” nature of the congressman’s battle against antisemitism, in a statement issued alongside the ad’s release. He is confronting this challenge, his team explained, by “connecting his family’s experience during the Holocaust to the hatred that continues to threaten our communities today.”
While Moskowitz’s great-grandparents died in Auschwitz, his grandparents were able to escape Europe right before the war. His grandmother left on the Kindertransport, an organized effort that rescued Jewish children from Nazi-controlled territories beginning in 1938.
By Tuesday evening, the Google Ads Transparency Center, which includes data on YouTube ads, did not yet reflect how much money the campaign had spent on its ads there. Meta’s Ad Library also did not yet have data as to how much had been spent on the Facebook version of the ad posted there.
Stephen Sussman, a professor of public administration at Barry University, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that although “Holocaust imagery should never become routine campaign material,” he doesn’t believe that this ad has crossed a line.
“The Holocaust was, of course, a real event that continues to shape Jewish life and memory,” Sussman said, recognizing that Moskowitz’s great-grandparents were murdered at Auschwitz and that many Jews today feel threatened by antisemitism.
“He is not comparing his opponent to Hitler or using the Holocaust to make an unrelated political attack,” Sussman added.
The professor also noted the ad’s direct connections to the congressman’s record, such as his leadership in passing bipartisan legislation on antisemitism awareness and in boosting funding for synagogue security.
Sussman acknowledged that when Holocaust imagery becomes part of a campaign, there “is a legitimate concern” that other people might deploy that imagery less responsibly. But he stressed that given Moskowitz’s history and work record, as well as the current political climate, this particular ad is “powerful but defensible.”
Ken Goldstein, a politics professor at the University of San Francisco, offered a similar perspective, explaining that of the thousands of ads he has watched in his lifetime, he found this one to be powerful but not particularly controversial.
“He was certainly using pictures of the Holocaust, jarring images, but they were his family’s story,” said Goldstein, who is an expert on the impacts of political advertising.
“I don’t think he’s using it to personally attack anybody else except the Parkland shooter,” he added, noting that the ad isn’t being used to attack an opponent. “This one does not strike me as particularly harsh, unfair, or out of bounds at all.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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