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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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Iran’s Rulers Seek to Die for God as Jews Aspire to Live for Him
Emergency personnel work at the site of an Iranian strike, after Iran launched missile barrages following attacks by the US and Israel on Saturday, in Beit Shemesh, Israel, March 1, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Iran’s increasingly reckless attacks across the Middle East have reached a new level. This week, debris from an Iranian missile struck the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City, just yards from the Al-Aqsa Mosque — Islam’s third holiest site.
The assumption was that this proximity would protect Christianity’s holiest site. Instead, the incident highlights a disturbing shift: Iran’s hostility toward Israel now seems to include a disregard for the holy sites of other faiths, and even Islamic holy sites.
The same disregard is evident elsewhere. In the Arab town of Beit Awwa near Hebron, a makeshift beauty parlor — a converted caravan — was filled with women preparing to celebrate the end of Ramadan. It was reduced to rubble by an Iranian missile, and three women were killed. So much for solidarity with the Palestinians.
Meanwhile, missiles continue to streak across the Gulf, slamming into energy infrastructure in Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Gas fields are burning, refineries are ablaze, and the Strait of Hormuz is effectively impassable.
Oil prices are surging, sending shockwaves through the global economy. And behind it all, the Iranian regime — now increasingly opaque, guided by shadowy figures claiming to act in the name of both nation and God — promises “zero restraint.”
This, despite the fact that Iran itself is already teetering on the brink. Its economy is shattered, its infrastructure is battered, and its leadership has been irreparably weakened by targeted assassinations and sustained military pressure from the United States and Israel.
And yet, they fight on. At a certain point, this all stops looking like strategy and looks like something else entirely. Wars are usually fought for territory, security, economic gains, or – pointedly – for survival.
Even brutal wars tend to follow a basic logic: Preserve what you have, weaken your enemy, and live to fight another day. Even when nations act ruthlessly, they are still, at some level, trying to ensure that there is a tomorrow. But what we are witnessing now feels different.
When a government targets global energy infrastructure, knowing it could cripple entire economies — including its own — when it risks sacred sites and civilian lives while claiming religious legitimacy, you have to ask: What is the endgame? What if survival is no longer the primary goal? What if the objective is something else entirely — something closer to sacrifice than strategy?
Not all Iranians share this trajectory. Voices like Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi — along with many Iranians inside and outside the country — have long argued for a future defined by stability and openness, the very opposite of the path the current regime seems determined to pursue.
There is a dangerous idea that surfaces from time to time in human history — often cloaked in religious language — that elevates destruction, even self-destruction, into an act of devotion. Not everywhere, and not in every interpretation.
But in certain ideological strands, including within the worldview of Iran’s ruling elite, conflict and chaos are more than political tools. They are seen as redemptive — even apocalyptic. And once you start thinking that way, the line between serving God and sacrificing everything — your people, your future — begins to blur.
We’ve seen this before. Such movements stop trying to build anything lasting; instead, they become intoxicated by their own vision: an idealized world that must either be realized in full or swept away entirely. The present moment becomes everything. The aftermath is an afterthought.
All this makes the third book of the Torah, Sefer Vayikra, all the more striking. On the surface, Vayikra reads like a manual of ritual sacrifice. Animals and birds are brought to the altar, slaughtered, their blood sprinkled, their lives offered back to God.
It is easy — almost instinctive — to see it as a theology of death. But that is a profound misunderstanding. The sacrificial system was never meant to glorify death. Quite the opposite. As Maimonides explains, its purpose was to transform the living.
A sacrifice is not about annihilation — it is about encounter. The Torah’s word for it is korban, from the root meaning to “draw close.” It is about proximity — kirvah — about narrowing the distance between human beings and God.
The ritual sacrifice experience was meant to be unsettling — to shake a person out of complacency and force a confrontation with the fragility of life and the weight of existence. After that, a person would walk away changed. The animal remains behind, but the human being surges ahead.
Yes, there are moments in Jewish history when one is called to give up life for Kiddush Hashem. Those moments are real and sacred. But Judaism never built its identity around dying for God — or destroying in His name. Instead, the Jewish people built a civilization around living for Him.
Dying for God is a single, dramatic act. Living for God is relentless. It means waking up every day and choosing discipline over impulse, responsibility over instinct, and purpose over comfort. It means biting your tongue instead of lashing out, acting with integrity when no one is watching, and showing up — again and again — long after inspiration fades.
It means sustaining a relationship not through intensity but through the quiet consistency of daily life. And that, as anyone who has tried it knows, is far harder. Grand gestures are easy. Consistency is exhausting.
That is why Vayikra is not just a book about sacrifices. It is the Torah’s handbook for sustained holiness. As it tells us, clearly (Lev. 19:2): “You shall be holy.” Not just once, for show, or to make a point. Not only in a moment of crisis. And certainly not in a surge of religious passion.
Holiness, in the Torah’s vision, is continuous. Like the Shema, recited quietly every morning and every night, it is about keeping the connection alive. Like acts of charity, given not as a one-off gesture but whenever they are needed.
Relationships — real ones — are not built on intensity or bursts of devotion that fade quickly. They are built on constancy. Anyone can make a grand gesture. Maintaining a relationship — with another person or with God — demands something far more difficult: presence, patience, and persistence.
That is what makes the current moment so unsettling. When a regime that claims to represent God’s will begins to romanticize destruction — even self-destruction — and escalation becomes an end in itself, chaos is embraced rather than avoided. It reveals a worldview in which dying for God has eclipsed living for Him.
Judaism rejects that idea at its core. God does not ask us to destroy the world in His name. He asks us to build it, and to build within it. In particular, He asks us to build in a way that will endure beyond us. To create families and nurture them. To form communities and care for them. To pursue justice, even for those with whom we disagree. Above all, He asks us to take a flawed, imperfect world and elevate it — not to burn it down, but to engage with it.
The altar in Vayikra was never meant to be a destination. It is a starting point. It is a place where a person confronts what could be lost — and then recommits to what must be lived. It reminds us that what God truly wants is not the life that ends in sacrifice, but the life that continues — day after day — in relationship, in responsibility, and in quiet, stubborn faithfulness.
The real test of faith is not whether you are willing to die for God. It is whether you are willing to live for Him.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Joe Kent’s Resignation Isn’t Actually About the War
Then-National Counterterrorism Center Director Joseph Kent attends a House Homeland Security hearing entitled “Worldwide Threats to the Homeland,” on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, US, Dec. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.”
That’s what Joe Kent, now the former director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, wrote in his resignation letter this week.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Read that without context — exactly how much of the media prefers to present it — and you might start to think that perhaps the United States is inserting itself into a conflict it has no business being part of. And frankly, I wouldn’t blame you. The clickbait headlines of the past week have incited and invited these conclusions.
But look just beneath the surface, and it becomes clear: This resignation has very little to do with the US military campaign and everything to do with a conspiratorial, antisemitic narrative dressed up as dissent. One that might resonate with figures like Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson but has no grounding in reality.
Let’s start with facts.
Iran has spent over four decades funding, training, and directing terrorist organizations responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians — including Americans — worldwide. Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and militias across Iraq and Syria are all backed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, collectively receiving at least (and likely more than) hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
At the same time, Iran has aggressively pursued nuclear capabilities while openly signaling how it intends to use them. In Tehran’s Palestine Square, a literal “doomsday clock” counts down to 2040, marking the regime’s stated goal of Israel’s destruction, an outcome it fully intends to be responsible for.
Given that reality, it is hardly irrational for a country, or its allies, to act before those capabilities are fully realized, or before Iran further entrenches itself as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
Which is why Kent’s framing matters.
When the director of counterterrorism resigns, claims opposition to military intervention, and then blames that intervention on the Jewish state, it begins to look less like principle and more like narrative-building. A deliberate contribution to the growing wave of anti-Israel sentiment in the United States.
Because the idea that Israel “forced” the United States into war is not just wrong; it’s absurd.
It requires believing that a small Middle Eastern country somehow coerced the world’s most powerful military superpower into spending billions of dollars, mobilizing naval fleets, deploying troops, risking strategic alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and disrupting global energy markets, all against its will.
It also requires believing that US President Donald Trump, known for being both unpredictable and strategic, was somehow pressured into a war he did not want to fight.
That simply does not pass the most basic test of logic.
Kent’s resignation letter is his ticket to fame. His introductory essay into conspiracy college, where his classmates and apparent mentors include none other than the likes of Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Megyn Kelly.
It also could be his ticket out of legal trouble — at least in his mind. Multiple media outlets reported that before Kent’s departure, the FBI opened an investigation into the counterterrorism chief for allegedly leaking classified information. Many observers have speculated his resignation could have been an effort to get ahead of the story and obscure the situation with as much conspiratorial nonsense as possible.
It’s worth noting that, according to a former Trump administration official, Kent frequently clashed with senior leadership, including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and FBI Director Kash Patel. Former White House staffer Taylor Budowich went even further, taking to social media to call him “a crazed egomaniac who was often at the center of national security leaks, while rarely (never?) producing any actual work.”
At its core, Kent’s argument falls into something quite familiar, a narrative as old as it is dangerous: Just blame the Jews. Even if they have absolutely nothing to do with it.
Alma Bengio is Chief Growth Officer at The Algemeiner and founder and writer for @lets.talk.conflict.
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Are American Universities the Next Front in a Gulf Rivalry?
Pro-Hamas demonstrators at Columbia University in New York City, US, April 29, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs
A recent report by the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce on antisemitism in higher education delivers a stark conclusion: In the wake of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, many US campuses have shifted from being sites of debate to environments where hostility toward Jewish students is increasingly normalized. The report documents rising harassment, rhetoric that blurs into justification of violence, and a growing reluctance by university leaders to enforce their own rules when speech is framed as political activism.
That warning points to a broader institutional problem. Universities are not only struggling to respond to ideological extremism; they are also increasingly embedded in global networks of funding, influence, and political engagement. In this environment, they risk becoming more than passive hosts of debate, emerging as spaces where external conflicts are projected inward, including the strategic rivalry between Gulf states now playing out on Western campuses.
Earlier this year, the United Arab Emirates suspended government scholarships for students planning to attend British universities, citing concerns about Islamist radicalization on UK campuses. For decades, Western institutions were viewed across the Arab world as gateways to modernity — exporters of science and pluralism. Now an Arab state is signaling that those campuses may no longer be ideologically neutral.
Britain’s situation reflects long-standing policy choices. The United Kingdom does not formally designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization and has long served as a hub for Brotherhood-linked activism. British academia enrolls significant numbers of Qatari students and maintains financial and institutional ties with Doha, placing campuses within a broader ecosystem of Qatari engagement and soft power. That matters because Qatar and the UAE sit on opposing sides of a wider Gulf competition over political Islam.
Since the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020, the UAE has positioned itself as a regional actor seeking stability, economic integration, and the containment of Islamist influence. Qatar, by contrast, continues to host Muslim Brotherhood figures and Hamas political leaders while expanding its global reach through media and partnerships with research institutions and universities.
The United Kingdom may have presented the most immediate concern for Emirati policymakers. But the broader question of ideological influence within Western institutions extends beyond Britain. Nowhere is that dynamic more consequential than in the United States.
Disclosures filed with the US Department of Education show that American universities have reported receiving more than $4 billion from Qatar over the past two decades, placing the Gulf state among the largest foreign funders of US higher education. Institutions such as Cornell University, Georgetown University, Northwestern University, and Texas A&M University have reported substantial Qatari funding supporting research programs, faculty, and academic centers.
Foreign partnerships and international funding are common in global higher education and do not automatically translate into political influence. The concern arises not from these relationships themselves, but from the political environment in which they operate — particularly when ideological movements tied to geopolitical actors become increasingly visible in campus activism.
Recent events on American campuses help explain why this matters. After the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, universities including Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, and NYU witnessed demonstrations that in some cases moved beyond criticism of Israeli policy into justification of violence, calls for a “global intifada,” and rhetoric widely understood by Jewish students as eliminationist. Congressional hearings later exposed how difficult it had become for some university leaders to state clearly that calls for genocide violate campus rules when framed as political expression.
The issue is not protest itself, which is intrinsic to academic life, but ideological activism that normalizes movements rejecting liberal democratic principles. In such an environment, Gulf rivalry intersects with Western institutional hesitation, and campuses risk becoming arenas not merely of debate but of strategic signaling.
If Abu Dhabi concludes that British universities are incubating ideologies it considers destabilizing, the same logic could extend to the United States. American universities are even more globally influential than their British counterparts, educating future ministers, financiers, and opinion leaders from across the Middle East — making them higher-value terrain in any competition over ideas.
Whether the UAE would take similar measures regarding US institutions remains uncertain. The strategic partnership between Washington and Abu Dhabi is deeper than the UAE’s educational ties with Britain. And while the United States does not designate the entire Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, it does designate Hamas — which originated as a Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood — as a terrorist group.
The UAE’s decision regarding British scholarships should therefore be seen as part of a broader regional struggle over political Islam and the future direction of the Middle East. If that struggle is increasingly playing out on Western campuses, Americans should ask a sober question: Are their universities merely observers of this rivalry — or are they becoming its next front?
Nira Broner Worcman is a Brazilian journalist, CEO of Art Presse Communications, and author of A Sisyphean Task (translated from the Brazilian edition, Enxugando Gelo), on media coverage of the war between Israel and terrorist groups. She was a Knight Science Fellow at MIT and earned her master’s degree at NYU’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program.