Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, and welcome to the New Books and Jewish Studies channel of the New Books Network podcast. I'm your host, Rabbi Mark Katz, author of Yochanan's Gamble, Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. And today I am in conversation with Professor Yitzhak Conforti, who is a professor at Bar-Ilan University and author.
of a new book, Zionism and Jewish Culture, a study in the origins of a national movement, put out by Academic Studies Press. What many people don't realize... is that Zionism is not a monolithic term. From its inception, there were rigorous debates about the nature and the direction of the movement. Thinkers had argued about some of the most fundamental questions around Israel.
Where would that future state be located? What language would they speak? Should Israel come about through a slow evolution or a radical revolution? In his book, Zionism and Jewish Culture, Professor Conforti situates us in the middle of these debates, zeroing in on the leaders of what has become known as cultural Zionism.
These groups of thinkers stood across the aisle from some more politically-minded voices like Theodor Herzl. As Professor Yitzhak Conforti explains, their approach was quite different. highlighting a more Jewish, more ethnic, more culturally centered Zionist vision. Zionism and Jewish Culture examines the history of Zionism from a brand new perspective, arguing that Zionism was not only a political project, but also a major cultural force in modern Jewish life.
And in exploring these topics, this book enables a deeper understanding of the forces that continue to shape Zionism and Israel today. So we are so pleased to be in conversation with Professor Conforti. And I want to welcome you to the show. Thank you so much for inviting me to the show. So tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you choose the topic of this book and who are you?
I'm an Israeli scholar dealing with Jewish nationalism and Zionism, mainly, as you said, from a cultural perspective. My fields of interest are Zionism, nationalism. Jewish historiography and memory. I've published many articles in these topics and I published three books. This is the first in English. I chose this topic because I realized that most works on Zionism, most academic works on Zionism, are aiming on Zionist political arena.
ideology and the conflict between Jews and Arabs. So I wanted to change a little bit the perspective to the cultural dimension in Zionism and in Jewish nationalism as a central force. in the creation and the development of the Zionist movement. For the past 20 years or so, I'm teaching. I'm a professor at the... Jewish history department at Parilan University. I'm teaching many courses for undergraduate and graduate students, but also I had the chance to spend some periods of time.
in America, in American universities and in England, mainly from the East Coast, from Boston to Philadelphia. I've been twice a visiting professor at NYU and a fellow in the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan. and a research fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at Philadelphia under the screen of UPenn. And last summer, I was invited to be...
visiting scholar at the Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University, where I completed my manuscript for this book. So let's jump into some of the themes of the book. So in the book... You talk specifically about this tension between what one would call political Zionism and what another would call cultural Zionism.
So nationalism in modern states are inherently political entities. But in your book, you tend to emphasize the central role less of the politics and more of the cultural roots of Zionism. Can you explain what you mean specifically by those cultural roots? Like, what is your approach specifically to the study of Zionism that might be different than another book on the topic?
Since World War II, I would say that the research of nationalism as a phenomenon is a very decisive and prominent phenomenon of the modern world. It was dominated by the modernist approach, which highlighted the historical context of what we call the long 19th century from the French Revolution until World War I and the creation of modern nations.
These scholars focus mainly on the political and economic aspects of nationalist movement. The nationalist movement mainly, they focus in Europe mainly, perceived as a top-down... phenomena organized by political and economic elite. They have created the national ideology and the so-called invented tradition by Eric Hobsbawm.
the imagined communities, as Anderson put it, in order to create a collective identity. Now, I argue that in order to fully understand nationalism, we need to use a more long-duration laundry.
we have to add the cultural dimension to the story of nationalism. This view is evident in the research of Anthony Smith, among others. In any case, when I'm... looking or trying to make sense of Jewish nationalism and the way that Zionism as a movement developed, it is, for me, it is essential to examine the pre-modern Jewish culture.
and its impact on modern Zionism. Jewish nationalism grew out of what we call diaspora nationalism and not from a given territory like many other nationalist movements, for example, in France, Germany. Italy and other places. It emerged Jewish nationalism from Jewish communities in Europe and all over the world. So we should ask, what motivates Jews?
from different countries, from different political and economic spheres to join the Jewish national movement. For Zionism, Jewish tradition was a very powerful force. to attract Jews to join the national movement. But I would say more of it. The cultural Zionism still preceded political Zionism in time. Before the establishment of the Zionist organization in 1897, in the First Zionist Congress, we know about the lovers of Zion, Hibat Zion. This kind of movement operated.
20 years before in Eastern Europe. Most of the figures of the lovers of Zion were basically cultural leaders. Rabbi Moliver and others. And even before that, when we look for the meat of the 19th century, a Hebrew renaissance took place in the peril of settlements in Russia. the return to the Hebrew Bible by Jewish Maschilim, Jewish Enlightened, and the publication of many Hebrew literature and Jewish or Hebrew education in Eastern Europe.
we find a Hebrew newspaper that had been published at that time. Popular novels, such as most notable, is Ha'avat Zion, The Love of Zion. by Avraham Mapu was very popular. He published in 1853. All these were created before the establishment of the Jewish political Zionist organization in the late... 19th century. As I will show later on, this movement or this storm in Zionism was very central and decisive also in the politics.
of the Zionist organization. So let's zero in on three different thinkers that you talk about in the book. So you mention Ahada Am, the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, and Peret... Smolenskin who each in their own way. added a kind of cultural flair to that Zionist conversation, pushing, for example, rather than saying it's only about territory, it's only about having a Jewish sovereignty, saying the importance of having...
Judaism at the core of this state, having Hebrew at the core of this state. So I'm curious, what role did each of these three thinkers play in shaping the Zionist consciousness? In other words, Why are they important? Right. Why bother writing a book that speaks about those three thinkers as opposed to the other panoply of people that were out there in the Zionist conversation? Well, I.
chose to highlight these three protagonists in my cultural Zionist narrative deliberately. I could have chosen people like Herzl, Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, that most of the works focus on them. But these three figures were very important in the evolution of the Zionist movement and from the cultural still. And as I will show you in the book, they had enormous impact on the Zionist awareness of the Jewish past as it developed in Jerusalem since the 1920s.
In the case of Peretz Molenskin, he's a little bit unknown, important figure, because he died at the beginning of the movement, and most of his activities were even before. He lived between the years 1842 and 1888. He was the editor and the founder of the journal Aschacher, the Dole, published in Vienna. from 1868. Ashachar was published in Hebrew and made a huge impact on entire generation of Jewish scholars, mainly from Central and Eastern Europe in the Pale of Settlements.
Mainly yeshiva bookers, yeshiva students, were familiar with Smolenskin's work, novels, and articles promoting Jewish cultural nationalism. They even named it themselves. as the Ashachar generation, Dora Shachar. Smolenskin argued, basically, that being a Jew requires one to acknowledge that he is a part of a Jewish nationhood.
and fraternity judaism for him was not merely a community of faith or a religion not merely religion but a people he was very much influenced by the rise of Romanticism at the time, and nationalism during the 60s and 70s of the 19th century in Germany, in Italy, because he lived in Vienna when... He published HaShachar, and this is evident in his first volume of HaShachar. He published his poem, The Love of the Homeland, Aavat Eretz Molede.
which is a very romantic, naive poet, referring to Yehuda Levy a little bit. He promoted the Zionist awareness of the Jewish past as a pastor. of a nation, a history of a nation, not just the history of a community of faith or religion. Now, Ahad Aham was the most influential cultural Zionist leader. of his time at the turn of the 20th century. Living in Odessa, he became a center for many young Jewish writers and scholars, coming from all the Pale of Settlements.
If you wish, he is kind of a secular rabbi that most of the Eastern European Jewish intelligentsia saw him as their esteemed teacher and even thought of. Prophet. Maybe he presented himself as a kind of prophet. Among them, Bialik, Ravnitsky, Yosef Klausner, Shimo Berelfeld, and many others. I would say, had a very systematic nationalist thought. Namely, he believed in evolutionary approach of Jewish nationalism. For him, the Jewish people is one individual.
one organic individual, one organic body. It is the time of our forefathers from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob until his time. In his first article, This is not the way. Very important article. He said the sentence, throughout all generations, the people is one. In Hebrew, I think that he chose his pen name, Ahad Ha'am, because of this slogan or verse. So he argued that the Torah teaches us
to establish a just nation in the land of Israel. Torah is not trying to teach us only individual demands or individual mitzvot. It's referred to the entirety of the Jewish people. He argued that if you look at the five books of Moses, in the Petit Luke, you will see that the aim is... to create a kingdom of a priest and a sacred nation. So this is the purpose, not individual demand, but the individual...
is referring to the entire people, to the collective people. The Jewish law ends, in Ahad Ha'am's view, to Klaal Israel. We should not forget that Ahad Ha'am had... background, Yeshira background, he knew a lot about the Talmud, about the Torah. So this is from... From the beginning, in 1899, when he published this article, he didn't change much in his philosophy. Hadam rejected the revolutionary view.
As you said in the introduction of Mikhail Yosef Berdichevsky and the young writers, as they call themselves, that sought to create a new Hebrew detached from the exilic values. and tradition. While Berdychevsky called to a radical revolution in Jewish life, he called for a moderate evolution from the age of exile, as he understood it, to old diaspora.
to a national period. He did not admit that he was influenced by others, but it is very clear that he was indeed influenced by national philosophy. Of his time, for example, Ernst Renan, the French scholar, and the English scholar John Stuart Mill argued that the definition of a nation is a spiritual definition. And you can see that Ahad Aam used this kind of thinking. He, a lot of times, speaks about the spirit of the nation as something very important for...
for Zionism. And the national existence depends on the collective consciousness, the will to exist. So in order, Hanam termed it in Hebrew, It was a very important term in a Hadam philosophy, because if the people will not have the will to exist, he will live, the Jewish people will die, as he said. He was also inspired by Herbert Spencer and his sociological evolutionary theory, the social organism.
It was at the same time in place of Darwin's biological theory, Ahadam admired, he was not alone in this case, the English moderate evolutionary way from pre-modern time. to modernization in contrast to the French Revolution that took place in the late 20th century. Oh, I'm not switching my team to some fancy work platform that somehow knows exactly how we work. And its AI features are literally saving us hours every day. We're big fans. And just like that.
teams all around the world are falling for monday.com with intuitive design, seamless AI capabilities and custom workflows. It's the work platform your team will instantly click with. Head to monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use. That I found really interesting in your book. When you talked about the difference between evolutionary versus radical change is the fact that some of these thinkers were willing to play the long game.
They're willing to imagine that a Jewish state might emerge, but it might take 200 years for that Jewish state to emerge, as opposed to a guy like Herzl, who wanted to figure out a way to make it happen tomorrow. I'm wondering, could you say a word about that? Because you've used the word ever.
revolutionary a few times. And I want to better understand that tension because it was fascinating when I read about it in your book. Yeah, I think that later on I will get back to it because in Herzl's term, as you said, correctly, when he wrote his utopia at Neuland, and I will talk about it a little bit later, he speaks about 20 years. It's going to be around the corner. We are going...
to get it. And when the Hadam speaks about the Jewish state, the Jewish state is not an end to itself. The Jewish state will come when it comes, like the Messiah. It will come after the process, the process of education, of changing the Jewish people from Jews in the diaspora. that in the eyes of Hadam are basically look at themselves as an individual to the little process that begins in kindergarten.
to change it, that the Jews will return to the model Jew of ancient time who is for the entirety of the nation, the live Israel Jew. But the debate was for Hadam, not in this regard, not so with Herzl, but more than there, within his own camp. Berdychewski was basically like a Hadam. He is a yeshiva booker that came out of the yeshiva from the Pale of Settlement. And he was very bright and learning in university.
He slammed the door after he went out of the yeshiva. And his approach, like many others, even a little bit afterwards being going on, His approach was that we have to create a new Hebrew detached from the traumatic past of the exiled and even... I won't say to throw out all the Jewish tradition, but to look back to the biblical time and not so much for exilic. way of thinking. So Hadam and many others preferred, as I said, the model of British, the British model of moderate.
a step-by-step change from early modern years to nationhood and not to do it in one step, as actually Berdychevsky called it, one big step. a jump from the Bible, as Ben-Gurin said once, from the Tanakh to the Palmach, and to let everything out in between. So this was not the approach of Hadda, and of course also... Bialik that saw himself as a student of Hadam, even though he had some issues with some things of Hadam, but Bialik admired Hadam.
In my eyes, Bialik was much more than the national poet. Bialik was an engine of cultural Zionism within the Jewish issue. in Palestine in the 1920s and 30s. He was an advocate of the Hebrew University. Many, I would say most of the scholars in the Hebrew University. was inspired by Bialik's approach to the Jewish past. He did not, by mistake, wrote the book of legend, Sefer Ha'agadah.
that bring out all the legends of the Kalmur, the legend of diaspora. And Bialik even called to what he termed canonization. of Jewish thought in the diaspora. He termed it in the Hebrew name Hatima. So sealing like the canonization of the Bible, canonization of the Mishnah, canonization of the Talmud, the Gemara, we should seal the chapter of exile and... enter to another area in the land of Israel. So they were really important to the Hebrew and Zionist system.
educational system in Eretz Israel, in the land of Israel during the issue of time. So there's something about these three thinkers that kind of makes me feel like they kept saying over and over again in these debates about what the nature of Israel would be, what the nature of Zionism would be. Don't forget about the soul, right?
I mean, it's no mistake that Hadam was an amazing writer, that Chaim Nachman Bialik was a poet. They each had these kind of poetic souls to them that said that if you're going to make this state, it's not just about land. It's about... who we are. It's about the kind of Judaism that's expressed. I'm wondering if you can say a word about that and maybe actually how that dovetails into the second part of your book, which...
really spoke about the political debates that were influenced by cultural Zionism. The idea that, you know, you can't, for example, it was called the Ugandan controversy. You can't stick Israel in some random corner of the world, the Jewish state, and say, this is going. to be authentic. If we're going to return and have a Jewish state, we need to do it in our homeland, in Hebrew.
in a Jewish milieu. And so I'm wondering if you can speak to that need on these part of these thinkers to put the soul back in Judaism and how that dovetailed with the Ugandan controversy. Bialik, in this regard, was an amazing writer and an amazing speaker in the oratory of the Hebrew University. In his oratory, in 1925, he speaks in sacred terms. So we need, as Jews, to bring from the diaspora...
all the synagogues as the legend says and not push them out from the university. It's part of our soul even though we are different people. We need to keep it in our very core, I believe, as a beacon of light. Now, as you said, the pre-modern... Jewish culture, the values, the legend, the symbols, the Bible was very visible even in the political sphere in Zionism from the beginning.
For example, internal political debates were full of pre-modern cultural references from both sides, liberals, seculars, religious, ethnic-oriented Jews. The first Zionist polemic started in the second Zionist Congress. It's called, in Hebrew, the cultural debate. It was the question of Jewish education in a future Jewish state. The debate caused the departure of some ultra-Orthodox Jews from the movement.
and brought an agreement between Hadam and the religious Zionist, very moderate leader Rabbi Linus, on the topic of education. It shows how important was Jewish education. for Zionist activists, not just one stone, all of them. I would say in this regard... that Zionism is kind of umbrella movement to many dreams and aspirations. So how would the future state or the future entity in Eretz Israel, in the land of Israel,
will look like? What is the nature of this state or society or whatever? For example, those dreams of Western Jewish state. In our terms, we will call it a liberal or democratic state. And others aspire to more Eastern society, more ethnic-oriented and emphasizing Jewish values. For example, after the publication of Alt-Neuland, I promise you that I will get back to Alt-Neuland in this discussion.
And that, for our readers, is Herzl's utopian novel about what the character of the Jewish state would look like if it ended up being realized. Yeah, Neuland is a utopian book. He called it a novel, not utopia, but this is a utopian book by the utopian genre of the time. It published in 1902, late 1902. And when it was published in German, Hadam knew German, and he read it, and he published a harsh criticism on the Zionist leader, on his utopia.
and he wanted to emphasize how important it is to embed within the designist movement not just Western values, not just state like other states. We are not going to the land of Israel to create another Serbia, he says, or another Nigeria. We will come to the land of Israel to create a... Jewish state. So he attacked the utopia of Al-Khoylan because in his eyes it was just, you know, Western.
planned to create a nation-state without or lack of many Jewish values. For instance, the utopia was written in German, not in Hebrew. Erzel did not refer to Hebrew, let's say, to Hebrew educational system in the land of Israel of the time. Erzel was very tolerant. and speaks in a very universalist meaning in terms to not just food.
the Jews in the land of Israel and all other religious and if you read you will see that his description of Haifa you will see the The House of Opera in Haifa will make shows in many languages, all the European languages. He did not mention even the Hebrew. And also, as we said earlier, for Herzl, the state or the new society will be activated. in a few years. It's not a long-term process. Storchad Ahm referred to another utopia, less known, of Alt-Neuland.
which is a beautiful book, he referred to another utopia that was written by one of his students, Elhanan Leib Levinsky. The title of the utopia is The Journey to the Land of Israel in the Year 2040. It was written in Hebrew. And that's that evolutionary idea, right? The idea that Israel will come about later. It doesn't need to come tomorrow. I found this section.
Absolutely fascinating in your book, because I was raised with this understanding that, you know, Herzl comes out with these two major works, right? This pamphlet that is nonfiction called The Jewish State about why Israel should exist. this. utopian novel, Alt New Land, kind of framing what Israel would look like. But it turns out, and you do this amazing job in your book of laying these out, it turns out that there were many different versions of these utopian type.
novels and visions of what Israel could or should be. You spoke about one of those, but it's almost as if every different kind of Zionism. Right. Whether we're talking the people who led with culture, the people who led with politics, the revisionist Zionists who basically said, like, we need a strong army to fight a war and take Israel by force. The labor Zionists who are these socialists who wanted to.
build this kind of socialist utopia that they each almost had their own utopian literatures that they pointed to to say, like, this is a picture of what we want to build. I wonder if you can speak a little bit more about that. It is really fascinating that until the end of World War I, at the age of imaginary Jewish state, it was even a little bit delusionary Jewish state. Because we are talking about a period that until World War I, it was not realistic.
to imagine that a Jewish state or even a Jewish autonomy or any entity will be approved by the Ottoman ruler. So up until 1970, the chances... to create a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, in the land of Israel, was very slim. But in this area, people could imagine. As you said, you can see utopias, not dystopias, utopias, those who want to create the good place, the place that is not...
It cannot be rich, but it's a good place in the land of Israel came from very different stems in the Zionist movement. There is the political utopia of Herzl. of Jacques Birel, a very interesting guy from the representative of Tunisia in the Zionist Congress and others.
You can see the socialist-oriented utopia from Adi Gordon and others. You can see even... the utopia of the religious Zionists of the time, which are very different from the religious Zionists that we are knowing now in Israel, that are combining between a new idea of socialism and... and Western education with Jewish religion. It's fascinating to read the utopia by Rabbi Saim. Henry Pereira Mendes from New York, that his book trying to draw how the 20th century...
happenings will happen. We call it looking ahead from 1899 to 2000. So you can see, as you said, Every stem, every ideological stem, every Jewish, even community-oriented, had their own utopia. And it was really important. What happened afterwards? Yeah. And so why do you think that was? You know, you could imagine a world where the conversation around what Israel and what Zionism should be stayed.
in journalism, stayed in people writing the kind of pamphlets like the Jewish state that Herzl wrote. Why this genre for this particular time period? The utopia? The utopia. This genre actually was, at that time, very popular in Western thinking, in Europe and also in North America. It was very popular.
that affected the social life in the United States. The most known utopia was the utopia by Edward Bellamy from Boston that he imagined sort of socialist, communist communities in the United States, and many communities actually developed after the Euro, the utopia in the 80s. I think, 8088 or something like that. He called it looking ahead from the year 2000. So Henry Pereira took his title and reversed it.
And there is a utopia by a very important economist, Jewish economist, like Herzl. I don't know if you know Herzl, but someone had Herzl. To read this utopia, it's called Freeland. Freeland, it is a sort of economic utopia in Africa, for the people from Africa. So it was a very popular genre at the time. And it related also to the fact, as I said before, to the fact that at that time...
Even Herzl admitted at that time the chances to realize, to materialize the Zionist idea was so slim that Herzl said when he came back from the land of Israel, he said, if I will not succeed, if I will not succeed... at least I will leave a novel. I will leave something to aspire to. So this is why it occurred. But afterwards, after World War I, when Balfour Declaration came... As Ben Gurion says, it's like a great... It was something that he did not expect it to be.
The utopia became much more realistic. It was a realistic utopia. It's something to plan how to materialize the idea to create a Jewish. state in the issue. So one of the things that your last answer made me think about is the fact that Zionism isn't a movement that was created in a vacuum, right? It's incredibly influenced by things like the rise of romanticism, the rise of nationalism, the kind of legacy of the Enlightenment. And one thing that I found...
fascinating in your book, maybe actually the most fascinating in your book, was your distinction between kind of the East and the West when it came to Zionism, right? The West being the kind of German approach to Zionism, which you could find in people like Herzl, right?
And then a lot of the thinkers that we're talking about, the Bialyks, the Ahad Ha'ams, they're from the East, right? A lot of them are living in Odessa and places around there. And one of the divides that you talk about is the difference between ultimately romanticism. and the Enlightenment are a little bit opposed, right? That the Enlightenment, which came earlier, was about individual rights. It was about a kind of universalism. Everybody treated the same.
And that actually, if you look at the way that Herzl writes, he's much more informed by that, even if he has some romantic pieces to his thinking. versus those who live in the East, the thinkers who are living in Odessa and other places like that, who are the fathers of cultural Zionism, who are much more influenced by Romanticism, the idea that it's our story, the idea that our poetry...
that our nation matters. It's a little less universal than in the West. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that and also whether or not this has to do with... general trends that were going on in the time that would cause Herzl to be a little bit more enlightenment and these cultural thinkers to be a little bit more romantic in their point of view. The vision, I would say, it's not so clear between these poles. Why I'm saying this? Because the fact that
represent Herzl as a Western, clear Western, an enlightened guy. And the way from the other side is Nordau attacked, Max Nordau attacked Hadam after he's attacking on Herzl. He sketched Hadam as one of the Eastern uneducated guys. This is not an accurate... assumption, estimate of what really happened. From the East, people like Pahad Aram and Pialik, and if you will, even political figures later, Ben-Gurion.
Weizmann was born in the Pale of Settlement. They admired the West, so they had a Western education as an auto-deduct. Western education, but they had it. They admired it. So they tried to... In one hand, they tried to... to take what they can from Western Soviet civilization and admire it. But let's not forget that they were Eastern. And their conception of what is modern nation state, not always.
went in the lines that Herzl and later on other Zionist leaders like Zabutinsky think this is the correct way. What I'm trying to say is that when you look on the Declaration of Independence, as it wrote in The Land of Israel, in Israel in 1948, you can see... how they are trying to make a sort of combination between East and West here. Because if you see, it's a very ethnic and Jewish-wise declaration.
There is the word Jew, Jew, Jew, all the way in the declaration. But it tried to combine values from Western civilization and to make a Jewish and democratic state. And this is really important even in our days. In one of the drafts, there were many drafts before they read the declaration. or completed the declaration from the beginning of 1948 until May 1948. And one of the verse...
Well, you can see the words Jewish and democratic state. This was the suggestion of Moschus. But it's like in the... You cannot see it now. It's like in the declaration right now. But in any way, in some of the paragraphs, you can see how the Bible is important in the first paragraph. This was contribution of Dungurion himself, the first three sentences, and the vision paragraph, which talked about justice, who talked about...
reaching hand to other nations, and we want peace as the vision of our prophets. So you can see both sides, Western and Eastern, combined in the declaration. I think that... This kind of thinking was in the entire issue, in the entire Zionist movement during the time that we are discussing.
I mean, it's yeah, the Declaration of Independence is a fascinating story. I mean, I'll point our listeners to another thinker, Neil Rogachevsky, who wrote an amazing book on the different drafts of the Declaration of Independence.
And he tells this story that there was a kind of no-name person that kind of got kicked down the totem pole who was going to write the first draft. And the first draft of the Declaration of Independence was written by a guy, correct my pronunciation if I'm wrong, but Beham. is I think how you pronounce his name. And he lived next door to a conservative rabbi named Harry Davidovitz.
goes to this guy, Rabbi David of its house, who happens to have this big library of all this Western literature, you know, John Locke and, you know, the Declaration of Independence in America. And he starts studying this stuff and he produces essentially. this first draft of the Declaration of Independence, which is kind of universal and based on Western culture.
And he hands it to Ben-Gurion, who basically takes a look at it, takes a red pen and basically rewrites half of it and said, apropos of everything we've been talking about, you're forgetting the cultural element of Zionism. Like, where's the Jewishness? Where's the... soul in this. And he basically rewrites huge sections of this to like to Jewify up what becomes the founding document of the state of Israel.
Now, I've loved our conversation together, but we're coming to an end. And I know there's so much we wanted to talk about besides this. But I just want to end with one final question, which is, you know, in the description of your book online, it talks about. the importance of this book for the current cultural discourse in Israel itself. And so I'm curious, how is this book going to help us understand the current polemic?
in the Israeli society today. What do you hope that when someone reads this, it helps to further a conversation that we're having right now? Yeah, well, it's... I think that it's important to understand that Israel is a project that did not start in 1948. And you have to understand the deepest terms that... occurred since the mids of the 19th century and Jewish modernity at large. Because Jewish modernity is something that, let's say,
Jewish in the age of traditional societies was very... Jews knew that they are Jews and they had no... Mostly, they had no... big question about it. But in modernity, to be a Jew is a voluntary question that everyone should ask himself. What kind of Jew I want to be? Universalist, nationalist, religious, what kind of religious, and so on and so forth. So Zionism came out of a big...
dispute and big debates between Jews. So we need to understand it because we are living in a time of polarization. We're living in a time in Israel. I think that this is also in American Jewry, but the depolarization is there always. We can embrace it, the fact that we have many ideas and many... and many thought how to step to the next generation of Judaism. But we need to understand also the basic thing that we have in common.
And the basic thing that we have in common is that we are a Jewish people with different ideas, different aspirations, and try to embrace it, try to understand how. to stay together in front of the challenges of the 21st century. I wrote this book about cultural figures, and I have to tell you something. It's really... As a researcher, usually you took a very remote perspective from your research. But I have to tell you that I've learned a lot from these guys.
And I hope that guys like that will lead us as leaders of not just the Israel, the Jewish people at large. asking the question what will going to happen 50 years from now, 100 years from now, how we keep our Jewish soul and Jewish people together. I imagine that the 21st century is going to revisit these thinkers in a really profound and important way. And your book gives a really important avenue. into how to do that. And so we thank you for being on this podcast again.
I'm talking to Professor Yitzhak Conforti. His book, Zionism and Jewish Culture, A Study in the Origins of a National Movement, is available from the Academic Studies Press. And once again, thank you so much for this really enlightening conversation. thank you so much thank you for inviting me it was a pleasure