Sublime

Brenner, complex though he was, was perhaps the cultural icon of the Second Aliyah. His work, still considered brilliant, surfaced issues with which Israel continues to wrestle. He would have undoubtedly done even more than he managed in his brief life, but he was murdered by an Arab mob in the 1921 Jaffa riots.

Jewish history is a living testimony to the power of ideas,

The first book of modern Hebrew literature in the Yishuv was written by Ze’ev Yavetz, who moved to Palestine in 1887. Deeply unsettled by those immigrants who seemed insufficiently committed to re-creating the Jew, he used his sharp pen to attack those who he felt failed to appreciate that the decision to come to Palestine ought to flow from a pass

Yavetz was but one of a number of writers shaping the Yishuv. Another, who became a leading writer not only of the Yishuv but of the Western world, was Shmuel Yosef (Shai) Czaczkes,

WHEN BIALIK PUBLISHED “To the Bird” in 1892, Jewish life in eastern Europe was miserable in many ways.

In Judaism, faith is not acceptance but protest, against the world that is, in the name of the world that is not yet but ought to be.

ON OCTOBER 29, 1956, JUST as Israel was preparing to launch the war that would become known as the Sinai Campaign, tragedy struck the home front. Arab Israelis had then been living under military rule for eight years, and levels of distrust still ran high. In preparation for the coming battle with Egypt, Israel issued a five P.M. curfew on all the

Jabotinsky and Trumpeldor worked with Patterson (who later described Trumpeldor as “the bravest man I ever knew”) to form the Zion Mule Corps.

Mordechai Berkowitz, a blacksmith, established a workshop