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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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Israeli-American soldier Moshe Katz, killed in Lebanon rocket strike, laid to rest on Mt. Herzl
(JTA) — Hundreds gathered on Sunday night at Israel’s military cemetery on Mt. Herzl for the funeral of Moshe Yitzchak Hacohen Katz, an American-born Israeli soldier who was killed by a rocket strike on Saturday in southern Lebanon.
Katz, 22, from New Haven, Connecticut, is the fifth Israeli soldier killed in Lebanon since Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy in Lebanon, resumed attacks on Israel following a 2024 ceasefire, after Israeli and U.S. strikes on Iran last month.
“With unspeakable tragedy I regret to inform you that my 22 year old son Moshe Yitzchak a*h a sergeant in the idf, fell in battle in Lebanon,” Katz’s father, Mendy, wrote in a post on Facebook on Saturday. “My oldest Son with a zest for life and jokes. Burial is tomorrow in israel. Maybe we only share good news. My heart is shattered and the wound is real.”
Mendy Katz had been in Israel when the war began and posted on March 7 about witnessing his son’s graduation from basic training with the Israel Defense Forces before returning to the United States via Egypt.
During the funeral on Sunday, Katz, who was posthumously promoted from corporal to sergeant and was affiliated with Chabad, was eulogized by a host of fellow soldiers who referred to him as a “true friend” who “always used to make sure that anyone around him was always taken care of.”
“Moshe was a brave soldier, we have proof of that, but more than that, he was a loyal friend, he was a hard-working son and a loving, caring brother,” Adina, Katz’s sister, said between tears during her eulogy. “Moshe’s body might be gone, but his legacy is not. He was a proud soldier and a proud Jew, and we are the proudest family.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered condolences to Katz’s family in a post on X and wished a speedy recovery to three other soldiers moderately wounded in the attack.
“Moshe z”l immigrated to the land from the United States, enlisted in the Paratroopers Brigade, and fought bravely for the defense of our homeland,” Netanyahu wrote. “On behalf of all Israeli citizens, we embrace Moshe z”l’s family in this difficult hour and wish a swift and complete recovery to our fighters who were wounded in that incident.”
On Sunday, Netanyahu announced that he had instructed the Israeli military to further expand its operations in Lebanon in order to “finally thwart the threat of invasion and to push the anti-tank missile fire away from our border.”
Menachem Geisinsky, a photographer and friend of Katz’s, also eulogized him in a post on Facebook, writing that he “forever will be my hero” for “his bravery in coming all the way from New Haven, Connecticut to fight for what he believed was right and also for being a man who wouldn’t tolerate a frown.”
“So be like Moshe. Be a hero. Make someone’s day. Make someone giggle or smile,” wrote Geisinsky. “Step up, and be the man Moshe was, and forever will be remembered as.”
Katz is survived by his parents, Mendy and Devorah Katz; siblings Adina, Yehuda, Shua and Dubi; and grandparents.
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A second poll of US Jews finds the same result: Most oppose the war in Iran
(JTA) — For the second time in a day, a nonpartisan poll has found that most American Jews oppose the U.S. military campaign against Iran — even as 90% of them say they oppose the Iranian regime.
The new poll, conducted by GBAO Strategies on behalf of the liberal pro-Israel lobby J Street, found that 60% of U.S. Jews say they oppose “the US military action against Iran.”
About the same proportion, 63%, said they believed “the most effective way to address U.S. and Israeli concerns about Iran’s nuclear program and destabilizing regional actions is through diplomacy and sanctions,” not military action.
And the majority of American Jews said they believed the war will not improve Israel’s security, with a third saying they believe the war will weaken Israel’s security.
As with the previous poll released earlier on Monday, the poll found a sharp partisan and denominational split in the results, with Republicans and Orthodox Jews more likely to support the war, which the United States and Israel jointly launched on Feb. 28.
A press release from J Street touted the survey as “the first methodologically sound poll of Jewish American opinion since the conflict began,” positioning the results as an antidote to findings from the Jewish People Policy Institute, which surveys “connected” U.S. Jews and has found that a majority of them support the war, even though the proportion has fallen since the war’s start.
“This data is a wake-up call for anyone claiming to speak for the American Jewish community while beating the drums of war,” J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami said in a statement. “Most American Jews see this war for what it is: A reckless, unforced error by a President who has no clear, achievable goals or an exit strategy. This poll proves that the ‘pro-Israel’ position is the pro-peace position – and that means stopping this war before more lives are lost.”
The survey of 800 Jewish registered voters was conducted March 24 to 26 and has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
The J Street survey also asked respondents about other issues related to Israel. It found that 70% of U.S. Jewish voters said they are more sympathetic to the Israelis than the Palestinians in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, compared to multiple polls finding an even split or slight edge for the Palestinians among Americans overall.
It also found that 70% of American Jews oppose unconditional military and financial assistance to Israel — reflecting a mounting political consensus that is at odds with the priorities of AIPAC, the traditional pro-Israel lobby.
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Their sons survived the battlefield but not their wounds. Now these Israeli mothers mourn together.
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — On the morning she left Jerusalem for a health retreat for bereaved mothers, Taly Drori was surprised to recognize another woman in her rideshare. More than two years earlier, they had often crossed paths in the intensive care unit of the same hospital, where their sons were being treated in neighboring rooms.
The woman was Hazel Brief, the mother of Yona, an American-Israeli soldier who was seriously wounded at Kibbutz Kfar Aza in the opening hours of the Oct. 7 attack. Drori’s son, Chanan, also a soldier, was severely injured in Gaza in December of that year.
Both women spent long nights watching their sons fight to graduate from intensive care into rehabilitation, a milestone neither reached. Consumed by their sons’ care, they barely spoke. When they passed each other in the ICU hallway of Sheba Medical Center, Brief said, it was often just “a nod and a look in the eyes, to say, I got you. I get you.”
After two months, Chanan died from a fungal infection. A year later, Yona followed.
The retreat, held in the Gilboa region in northern Israel, offered a different kind of rehabilitation, Brief said, a “sacred space” where hallway nods gave way to a shared language of grief, as mothers try to rebuild themselves.
The gathering was part of a new initiative by OneFamily, an Israeli nonprofit that supports families of terror victims and fallen soldiers. Its impact is so significant that founder Chantal Belzberg was awarded the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement last week, the highest civilian honor awarded by the Israeli government — at a time when more Israelis are unfortunately joining its constituency.
“I am moved not because of myself, but because of the people for whom OneFamily was created: bereaved parents, widows, orphans, bereaved siblings, double orphans, and the wounded, with visible and invisible wounds,” Belzberg said in a statement. “This prize is, first and foremost, recognition of them. It is an embrace for the thousands of families who continue to carry this country, even when their hearts are broken.”
Belzberg’s daughter, Michal Belzberg-Slovin, is a yoga instructor who embraced Drori’s suggestion for a weekly health-and-wellness circle for bereaved mothers, centered on movement, mindfulness and nutrition. During the current war, meetings are taking place in a bomb shelter. But before it began, Belzberg-Slovin led 10 weeks of Wednesday sessions before the group traveled north together.
The program draws more than a dozen women, ranging from their early 40s to late 70s, all bereaved mothers of soldiers except one whose son was killed at the Nova music festival. It was originally intended for mothers bereaved in the current war, but the flyer OneFamily circulated omitted that detail. As a result, several mothers who had lost sons years earlier joined the circle as well. Belzberg-Slovin called it a happy accident, saying their presence was “very strengthening and healing,” and that it offered newer members a glimpse of how life can reshape itself around loss over time.
After Chanan’s death, Drori said she felt grief register physically before she could process it emotionally. “My life energy was draining away from me,” she said. She described chest spasms, sleeplessness and difficulty concentrating. At one point, she struggled even to stand upright. “I felt like I was made of lead.”
The next summer, she and her husband Roni spent several weeks at a health retreat on a kibbutz in northern Israel, a change of scenery that coincided with the war with Iran. The days were structured around nature walks, breathing exercises, yoga and simple, clean meals.
“The place slowly brought us back to life,” she said. That experience, she said, convinced her that bereavement requires deliberate physical care as well as emotional support, because “grief and trauma are stored in the body.”
Drori took the experience and pitched it to OneFamily as a half-day program to fit into the routines of women juggling work, family and mourning. Belzberg-Slovin bought into the idea immediately.
“This is my language,” she said, describing years of yoga, reflexology and aromatherapy.
Belzberg-Slovin had grown up around OneFamily, which her parents founded in 2001 after the Sbarro pizzeria bombing in Jerusalem, inspired by her decision as a bat mitzvah-age girl to forgo a party and redirect the money to victims and their families.
The Wednesday circles became even more of a family affair when her husband, Nadav, stepped in to cook the group’s vegan meal.
While not bereaved herself, Belzberg-Slovin said her own uneven path into adulthood has made her attuned to other people’s pain. She recalled a childhood in which terror victims and their families were always in her home, and a young adulthood marked by hurdles, including an eating disorder, cycling though career paths and remaining single long after most of her peers were married.
“I’m not one of them but something in my upbringing gave me the sensitivity to be fully with them in this process,” she said of the women in her circle.
Yoga and OneFamily, she said, were the two constants. “OneFamily has always been my identity. I always went back to it,” she said. Now, married with two children and a third on the way, she said she finally feels she is arriving on her own terms. “Now I’m bringing my new self into OneFamily which is special for me.”
The circle incorporates trauma-sensitive yoga, adapting an approach often used with survivors of sexual abuse and other trauma. The emphasis, Belzberg-Slovin said, is not on achieving a pose but on slowing down and respecting where the body is holding. A second yoga teacher, who is also a licensed therapist, facilitates the group discussion afterward.
She described one participant who shared that she found it hard to enter a supermarket because she saw reminders of her son everywhere. “How do you get from yoga poses to speaking about grocery shopping? But that’s what happens,” Belzberg-Slovin said. “We bring up everything the body raises.”
One of the veteran bereaved mothers on the retreat was Ruhama Davino, whose son was killed nearly 12 years ago during the 2014 conflict in Gaza. Davino said she kept her relationship with OneFamily at arm’s length, speaking by phone but repeatedly declining invitations to attend programs. “Every time they called, I said no,” she said. “I wanted to stay far from the bereavement and just continue my life.”
She doesn’t know what made her finally show up to the Wednesday health circle after so many years, but she left the first time without any doubt that she would be back, she said. “It’s powerful to be there, to be part of it, to draw strength.” Being in a room with mothers newly bereaved, alongside others who have lived with loss for years, changed her mind. “In the end, each of us needs this for the body and the soul,” she said.
Before the war, Chanan Drori had been studying biotechnology at Hadassah College and was preparing to begin his final research project in a medical research lab. After his death, the lab launched a research track in his name focused on infectious fungi, the complication that ultimately killed him.
“Chanan dreamed of helping people for whom no cure existed,” Drori said. “He dreamed of developing those medicines, so we felt like the best way to commemorate him was by realizing his dream.”
Chanan was treated at Sheba by Dafna Yahav, the head of its infectious diseases unit, who also treated Yona. Brief credited Yahav with pushing to bring in experimental drugs from overseas and said she never approached the family as a case first. “With all her accolades and running departments and being a world renowned expert, she’s an incredible human before being an incredible doctor,” Brief said. “She always responded first as a mom talking to another mom.”
Although the timelines were different — Yona was hospitalized for 417 days and Chanan for two months — Brief said the two mothers shared a form of loss that is hard to explain even to families of other soldiers who receive their news in an instant, with a knock at the door.
The similarities didn’t end there. Both men had volunteered to serve. Chanan did not meet criteria for a combat role, and Yona was exempt after he was wounded by an exploding pipe bomb months before Oct. 7. Both men loved music. OneFamily helped bring a piano for Yona, who played piano and guitar, into the hospital.
Both men and their families believed they would survive. Despite sustaining 13 bullet wounds and enduring repeated complications during his hospitalization, Brief said she expected Yona to “make it.”
Three weeks before Chanan died, doctors woke him from a medically induced coma and the family brought musicians to play at his bedside, including Yagel Harush, a singer he loved. The family invited Harush back to sing at the celebration they expected to hold after Chanan’s recovery, and at his wedding to his fiancée, Rivka.
“He was supposed to live,” Drori said.
Instead, this winter, two weeks after Drori returned from the north, Harush performed at a memorial event for the second anniversary of Chanan’s death.
When Drori met Brief again at the retreat, the two women posed for a photo to send to Yahav. Brief said she didn’t want to describe the retreat as “nice” or “comforting,” because nothing offers real consolation — “there’s no nechama,” she said, using the Hebrew word for solace. But OneFamily, she said, offered something she struggled to find elsewhere.
“You so often feel abnormal in society and here all of a sudden you feel normal,” she said. “Here’s another mom that knows what it’s like to see her son in intensive care for an extended period of time. I can’t share that with many people.”
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