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Theodor Herzl published his utopian romance, Altneuland, in 1902. A spirited debate soon broke out, spurred by Ahad Ha'am's assertion that the state envisioned by Herzl had no specifically Jewish elements and was no different from a \"normal\" European state. Many scholars have adopted Ahad Ha'am's reading and seen the utopian polity of Altneuland as devoid of any meaningful Jewish identity. In recent years, however, several studies have emphasized the Jewish dimension of the state Herzl described and highlighted his attempt to establish a new Jewish identity on a secular national basis.

There can be no doubt with regard to the formative influence that Ahad Ha'am's cultural Zionist ideology exercised in the Yishuv and in the Diaspora in the first half of the twentieth century. More recently, however, its influence has waned. The question of whether Ahad Ha'am's conception of the Jewish people and its cultural identity is still serviceable or is in fact detrimental has been raised in two recent books by Israeli authors. In the Diaspora, there are no comparable signs of interest in evaluating the continuing importance of his message. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

This essay seeks to amend a peculiar shortcoming in the current scholarship on Ahad Ha-Am: whereas his style and rhetoric are commonly celebrated, they are seldom examined or analyzed in any detail. Scholarship tends to conflate his literary with his political endeavors and to trace his political impact to his preeminence as an essayist and editor; yet this approach fails to account for his political ineffectuality even at the height of his literary success. This essay suggests, on the contrary, that his essays manifest a struggle to reconcile the demands of politics with those of rhetoric, that is, to reconcile the dialectic form of his argument, the vehicle of his political argument, with the figurative form his rhetoric aspires to achieve. In a reading of three of Ahad Ha-Am's major essays, \"Emet me'erets yisra'el\" (1891), \"Te'udat Ha-Shilo'aḥ \" (1896), and \"Mosheh\" (1904), the essay probes how this struggle shapes his political vision, his literary vision, and his perception of the role of the historical leader (and, ostensibly, his own) in forming a national community. The essay traces Ahad Ha-Am's difficulties in reconciling rhetoric and politics to his tussle with the bequest of Hibbat Zion literature. Whereas Ahad Ha-Am's reliance on traditional Jewish genres, on the one hand, and on English and German philosophical literature, on the other hand, has been readily noted, his indebtedness, to the writings of Hovevei Zion in general, and to that of Leo Pinsker in particular, is yet to be recognized. It is in Pinsker, I shall contend, that one finds one of the most important precursors to Ahad Ha-Am, not only in politics, but in rhetoric as well. Last, this essay probes the prevalent (Marxist) model of reading the political character of Hebrew literature. Such a model fails to give account for the tension that structures the Ahad Ha-Am essay. Whereas this model presupposes that literary rhetoric can take part in the symbolic struggles that make up the political realm, the reading of the Ahad Ha-Am essay put forward in this essay questions the nature of the exchange between rhetoric and politics. It thus suggests that a different model of reading of rhetoric and politics is in need, a model that would account for the failure to reconcile the two.

Two people were killed and several were wounded when a man armed with a submachine gun opened fire in a gay youth center at the corner of Nahmani and Ahad Ha'am streets in Tel Aviv on Saturday night.

The program, created by Boston's Hebrew College and the Combined Jewish Philanthropies, takes the historical- critical approach and avoids preaching theology or apologia. Students have the freedom to think whatever they want about the texts; the key is to engage in the conversation with them. They study the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature in the first year, followed by medieval and modern Jewish history and thought. They read the writings of Rabbi Akiva, Maimonides, Ahad Ha'am, and scholars such as Moshe Greenberg and Isaiah Gafni. Julia Child is passe; rabbinics and secondary sources like Avi Ravitzky are all the rage. What is going on? Ahad Ha'am opined that modern Jewish nationalism would create a cultural critical mass, a center radiating centripetal energy outward to the Diaspora periphery, enabling it to survive, maybe. Yet today the situation seems different, if not exactly a reversal of fortunes. Israeli kids come to American Jewish schools, where they see all sorts of Jews, not just Orthodox children, engaging Judaism. Those same Israeli sojourners in the Diaspora learn how to shake a lulav and etrog, even if they can read the Mishna Sukka in the original. Jewish learning can never merely touch the mind; it always touches the Jewish soul, somehow. Why else would secular Jews study Jewish history rather than Chinese pottery? A thin, perhaps meaningless, divide separates cognition and emotion, at least for Jews. In that sense, studying the Hebrew Bible, even with the commentary of Israel Finkelstein and other Bible critics, brings Jews back to their books, and to their people.

Upon arriving at the synagogue he heard that the introductory prayer welcoming the Sabbath had already been completed and that the congregation was already standing to pray the first Shabbat prayer. The Jew, beside himself in anguish at having been late for Shabbat, shouted a great shout of agony and frustration. THIS PAST election gave voice to the great Jewish shout that resides within the broad Israeli public. It was a shout about Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, about Rachel's Tomb and the Machpela Cave in Hebron. It was a shout that said that even if many of us are not necessarily observant, we still are Jewish. We might not be strict Sabbath observers, but we don't want Saturday to be just like Tuesday. [Ahad Ha]'am nevertheless wrote home to his family: \"I am now in Jerusalem. I cannot express to you, even in a small way, my emotions at being here. Every step, every stone speaks to me of our history. Mount Zion, the Temple Mount, the Mount of Olives. Only when one is here does one realize how foolish it is of our opponents, the Arabs, to think that we will ever give up on Jerusalem. It is the heart of the Land of Israel, the heart of the Jew. I am convinced that every inch of Jerusalem is not less worthy than the most developed settlement that we have built in Galilee.\"

From it came the inspiration for his father's dignified, uncompromising, enlightened piety, and also the erudite, Germanic condescension of Kaplan's Jewish Theological Seminary colleagues (a \"nasty satirical squeak\" is how Kaplan characterized the voice-and, no doubt, the mind-of Louis Ginzberg). Jewishness, not Judaism, as he suggests in the Menorah Journal, must situate the celebration of the Land of Israel and Zionism into the core of its commitments.17 But no less significant for Kaplan, I believe, was his role as personal exemplar.

Ahad Ha-'Am's intellectual and literary gifts rendered him virtually unique among the founding fathers of the Zionist movement. But these alone do not account either for his extraordinary influence over his contemporaries or for the attention his variation on some of the major themes of Zionism continues to draw. To the brilliance and clarity with which he expressed his views and the sharpness of his critical vision of the scene about him must be added the sober, not to say pessimistic and minimalist, content of his teaching. To men who were appalled by the huge disparity between the afflictions of Jewry and the means actually available to cure them, Ahad Ha-'Am's formula for avoiding the main burden altogether -- that task which Herzlian Zionism had originally sought to assume -- could not fail to be attractive, if not compelling. /// [Abstract in Hebrew].

Yet, as [Joseph Goldstein], a Haifa University historian, correctly observes in the final chapter of his new Hebrew biography, although [Ahad Ha]'am had a way of suavely fudging crucial distinctions, life - a great fudger itself - has made his thought look more enduring than do his own question-begging essays. Both Ahad Ha'am's critics on the right, like Rabbi Shmuel Mohilever, one of the founders of religious Zionism, and his critics on the left, like the Hebrew writer Michah Yosef Berdichevsky, had truth on their side when they argued that his attempt to save Jewish tradition for modernity by smuggling secular values into it was an intellectually shallow synthesis that debased both real faith and real skepticism; but truth is not what holds peoples and communities together and 20th-century Judaism most obviously that practiced in the United States, but in many ways that of Israel too has turned out for most Jews to be precisely such a synthesis.