Sublime

Born in 1856 in Ukraine (four years before Herzl’s birth), Asher Zvi Ginzberg took on the pen name Ahad Ha’am (“One of the People”), by which he is

Mordechai Berkowitz, a blacksmith, established a workshop

After his father fell upon difficult times (another biographical detail common to many of the early Zionist leaders), Ahad Ha’am decided to move to Odessa, the hub of the intellectual Jewish renaissance to which he was so drawn. The sole Russian city in which Jews were permitted to live, Odessa was home to a thriving Jewish intellectual milieu; man

Using this alternate route, the Harel Brigade (under the command of Yitzhak Rabin, then twenty-six years old) succeeded in resupplying and defending the western parts of the city—but they were still unable to recapture the Old City.

With Britain now fighting the Nazis, the Yishuv found itself in an almost untenable position. The British were the enemies of the Yishuv because of their restrictions on immigration, but the British were also fighting the Nazis. With whom should the Yishuv side? In what became the de facto description of the Yishuv’s position, Ben-Gurion said famou

Yet those markets about which Naomi Shemer had sung had not been uninhabited.