Following the Torah’s account of Jewish bondage before Moses led the Israelites into the Holy Land, the Hebrew Bible devotes no less than 19 books to as many prophets of Israel. After four ‘former’ ones and three ‘latter’ ones, the Book of Twelve covers as many ‘minor’ prophets, as St. Augustine later categorized them. Midway through it sits Micah, an 8th century BCE prophet whose book alternates between doom and hope, in a pattern that matches Israel’s vicissitudes at the time of writing. After a peaceful period, the Assyrian empire reduced Israel and Judah to vassalage in the 730s BCE. Israel rebelled upon the death of emperor Tiglath-Pileser III, triggering the vengeful destruction of its capital, Samaria. Micah 1:2-7 fictionalizes the city’s siege: God has punished Samaria for its idolatry, oppression of the poor, and misuse of power. Later the Assyrians attack Judah, the backstory to verses 1:8-16, in which Micah warns of the looming disaster. Verses 2:1-5 denounce greed in those towns. Following more Godly judgment of Israel’s leaders in verses 3 and 4, Micah prophesizes Zion’s restoration in verse 5. God will rebuild the Temple, based not on violence and corruption but on the desire to learn His laws, beat swords to ploughshares, and live in peace. One oft-quoted verse (Micah 4:4) forebodes that “everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree.” Lesser known but equally fateful in Micah’s prophecy is the following omen: “and none shall make them afraid.”
This latter verse rings akin to the Jewish equivalent of the Gadsden flag, with its cautionary injunction—appropriated by the Tea Party—beneath a curly snake: “Don’t Tread on Me.” Micah’s words are indeed a deterrent and an admonition against all foes wishing to subdue the Jewish people or otherwise disturb their peace. The verse entitles a remarkable new book by Rick Richman, And None Shall Make Them Afraid (2023). The tome marshals previously unpublished evidence to piece together eight short biopics of decisive leaders in the history of Zionism, and thus of the Jewish people. Richman is a far more accomplished writer than his own biography allows. He graduated with honors from Harvard and NYU Law School but has evidently foregone the riches that that education could command in his native New York for a much worthier life, one centered on learning and writing about the chosen people’s history, with a particular focus on American Zionism. He authored a towering work of World War II scholarship, Racing Against History (2018), which chronicles the 1940 campaign by David Ben-Gurion, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and Chaim Weizmann to recruit a Jewish army to fight Hitler, and thus secure the Jews a place among the war’s victor nations. This newer tome is similarly fated to claim its place in the bookshelves of Jews and gentiles aiming for a better understanding of the Zionist epic.
The book starts predictably with Zionism’s founding father, yet Richman alleges that Theodor Herzl was led to formulate the ideology not by the Dreyfus trial, as often believed, but by Karl Lueger’s mayorship of Vienna. He finds only 12 mentions of the degraded French officer in Herzl’s diaries, and many more of the Austrian antisemite. Back in Paris in 1895, Herzl wrote to Maurice de Hirsch, who was then helping relocate pogrom-fleeing Russian Jews to Argentina. The meeting de Hirsch granted him appears in Herzl’s diary as Zionism’s true genesis. Amidst worsening health and family conditions, Herzl went into a binge of political ideation, with friends fretting for his sanity. Richman stresses that among Zionism’s intended beneficiaries, Herzl placed Europe on par with the Jews, hoping that a Jewish state would serve as a mirror image of the old continent’s better, liberal self. After taking his ideas to philanthropists, the Jewish intelligentsia and the public, Herzl established a Congress that settled for a Jewish state as its endgame. In due course, he had to balance out two competing aims: (1) the so-called Basel program’s long-term goal of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and (2) the need for an immediate refuge from persecution. Though he lobbied the UK for such a refuge, he later steered Zionism towards Palestine as the non-negotiable destination. Richman writes that Herzl’s story “bears resemblance to that of Samuel”, his achievements “of biblical proportions.”
Richman then leads us deep into his wheelhouse with a vivid portrait of the leading American Zionist, Louis Brandeis, whose approach to Herzl’s ideology “was through Americanism,” in his own words. The jurist and later Supreme Court justice barely addressed the Jewish question for most of his life, and only through a markedly assimilationist lens. In a 1905 speech in Boston on “What Loyalty Demands,” Brandeis negated the existence of Jews as a distinct people, warning that their failure to meld into the American melting pot would mean disloyalty towards the only country that had welcomed them with open arms. But in 1914, spurred by a warm friendship with Jacob de Haas and by reading the epoch’s Jewish greats—Hess, Pinsker, Nordau—Brandeis made his conversion to Zionism public with a rousing speech at Columbia entitled “A Call to the Educated Jew.” In it, he argued that it was not Europe—perhaps not even America—that had succeeded in protecting Jews legally as individuals whilst also acknowledging their existence as a distinct nation. Richman calls this a “180° turn” in the thought of Brandeis, who had finally come around to the necessity of a Jewish state to fulfill the two imperatives. He later wrote that “to be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists.” In 1917, through his intense lobbying of President Wilson, Brandeis became instrumental to that goal by securing America’s support of the Balfour Declaration.
Next comes the man who held the Zionist coalition together as leader of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann, who even managed to keep harmony between Jews and Arabs for a fleeting period. Richman recounts a meeting in London with King Faisal, advised by Lawrence of Arabia, where Weizmann extracted Arab acceptance of the Balfour Declaration in exchange for Zionist support of an Arab state in the Ottomans’ wake. Faisal remained an ally despite the demographic balance in Palestine tilting markedly in the Jews’ favor, writing in 1918: “we are demanding Arab freedom, and we would show ourselves unworthy of it if we didn’t say to the Jews—welcome home.” Yet with the end of Faisal’s Arab revolt in 1919 and his eviction by the French from Syria, Richman writes that “the fierce, century-long Arab opposition to Zionism had begun.” Although the alliance he had brokered was floundering, Weizmann remained a friend of Lawrence, who in turn stuck with Zionism. Richman recounts the UK’s rather wavering support of the Zionist cause, from its endeavors to fulfill the Balfour Declaration through the UN-brokered mandate in 1922 (with Churchill saying “the Jews are in Palestine as of right, not on sufferance”) to its neglect of the mandate’s obligations through the 1939 White Paper (ditto Churchill: “a plain breach of a solemn obligation”). Weizmann called the paper “a sort of Munich applied to us at a time when Jewry is drowning in its blood.”
Richman then introduces Vladimir Jabotinsky against the backdrop of the Peel Commission, a taskforce set up in 1930 to quell Arab violence against Palestine’s Jewish settlers. The godfather of revisionist Zionism was no stranger to conflict. At the end of World War I, he had founded the Jewish Legion, which Richman labels “the most prominent Jewish force in three millennia,” a regiment of 15,000 that helped liberate Palestine. Jabotinsky carried on his army-raising by forming the Haganah in 1920, a militia that would enforce what he called the “Iron Wall,” essentially matching the Arab wish to nip the Yishuv with violence of its own. In 1923 came Betar, a youth league preaching, in his own words, that “every Jew is a prince.” Jabotinsky’s vision of Jewish sovereignty was laid out in his 1937 testimony to the Peel Commission. Jews were to settle on both sides of the Jordan with “no question of ousting the Arabs,” although he also likened their competing claims to those “of appetite versus those of starvation.” Jabotisnky’s revisionism was thus uncompromising, even wishfully so. In the late 1930s he soured on the Brits, who had “failed not only to provide security for the Jews but even denied their right to self-defense.” The Commission’s report came out remarkably pro-Jewish, although when push came to shove, Jabotinsky opposed the partition plan (“the land allocated to Jews was less than a drop in the ocean of our distress and land hunger”).
Emerging in roughly the same timeframe, from the Left, is “lioness” Golda Meir, whose life story is soon to be adapted into a Netflix documentary. “The first female head of state in the Western world” was born in 1898 in Kyiv, then Tsarist Russia, and in 1906 was reunited in Milwaukee with her father, who had fled in search of a new life for the family in the wake of the 1903 Kichinev pogrom. Golda soon joined the ranks of the labor Zionist movement, and after World War I she emigrated to Palestine and joined a kibbutz with her socialist husband. Amidst the depths of the Great Depression, she capitalized on her American ways to raise vast sums of money for the Zionist cause, with American crowds hailing her as “the First Lady of the Jewish people” and David Ben-Gurion, in whose cabinet she would later serve, asserting that she was “the woman who got the money which made the state possible.” Yet in Richman’s account, the inflection point in Golda Meir’s path to becoming a “lioness” was the 1938 Evian conference. As the emissary of Jewish Palestine to that abhorrent failure to salvage European Jewry when it was still possible, Meir learned that “Jews neither can nor should ever depend on anyone else for permission to stay alive.” She expanded to a press gaggle at the conference’s end: “there is one thing I hope to see before I die: that my people should not need expressions of sympathy anymore.”
Another American Jew who first lived indifferent to Jewish issues but then made Zionism his life’s struggle was playwright Ben Hecht. In his 1964 New York Times obituary, Hecht’s involvement with Zionism got a “brief, unflattering description.” What a miss. Richman writes that “in an age of isolationism, Hecht helped define what it meant to be an American Jew in the world”. The trigger to his conversion was Kristallnacht in 1938. The year after, he published a compendium of novellas, one of which fictionalized an even worse pogrom, killing not 2.500 Jews but half a million. It contained a sweeping reflection on the Jewish condition and the necessity of Zionism: “we were Jews again, whatever our previous conceptions of ourselves had been … We knew that our impatience as a people … demanded we become a nation—and make a fight of it.” In 1941, after a chance meeting with one of Jabotinsky’s followers, he agreed to co-chair the Committee for a Jewish Army and even wrote in support of Jewish attacks on British colonial authorities. Though he surely proved decisive in jolting America into defending European Jewry, Richman’s account of Hecht’s role turns here somewhat hyperbolic: “it would take Hecht to finally induce a belated reaction, in 1944, from the FDR administration.” At his funeral in 1964, Menachem Begin eulogized him as a man “who wielded his pen like a drawn sword” and “did so much for the Jewish people and the redemption of Israel.”
Towards the end of the book, the politicians, fighters, and writers give way to the diplomats. Abba Eban, an erudite scholar of Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian literature with a matchless command of English, marked his appointment as Israel’s United Nations (UN) emissary amidst the 1948 War of Independence against five Arab armies with the following harangue: “the sovereignty regained by an ancient people, after its long march through the dark night of exile, will not be surrendered at pistol point.” Eban predicated his stout diplomacy on the premise that the Jewish people’s return to its ancient homeland meant progress for the entire human civilization, and upon Israel’s admission into the UN he asserted: “a great wheel of history comes full circle today, as Israel offers itself to the defense of the human spirit against nihilism, conflict and despair.” Eban went on to serve brilliantly as Israel’s man in New York City for a quarter of a century, providing ample diplomatic coverage to the country’s self-defense against repeated Arab aggression. Yet, in 1974, the newly elected PM Yitzak Rabin humiliated Eban by excluding him from the ministerial post he was widely expected to fill, which launched him into a brilliant scholarly career that nonetheless proved unfulfilling. Richman writes of his dismissal: “Eban’s tragedy was that the talents that led to his diplomatic success in the world contributed to his political failure at home.” Those talents remain in dire need today.
Ron Dermer’s diplomatic service was no less momentous, and certainly less tragic. A Jew from Florida, son, and father to two mayors of his hometown, Miami Beach, and a graduate of Wharton and Oxford, Dermer moved to Israel in 2004. The following year, then-Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed Dermer as Israel’s economic attaché in Washington (he later returned to Jerusalem in 2009 to be Netanyahu’s speechwriter, and would later be appointed Ambassador to the U.S. in 2013). Upon relinquishing his U.S. citizenship, as mandated by U.S. law, Dermer attached a 625-word essay entitled “Proud to Have Been an American” to the requisite State Department one-page form. “I left America because I wanted to help another nation I love defend the freedoms that Americans have long taken for granted.” In a 2016 speech to B’nai B’rith International, Dermer identified that connection between the two countries as a shared “sense of purpose”, a shared covenant to carry the “torch of freedom” and advance common values. But the zenith of Dermer’s diplomacy came around Netanyahu’s 2015 speech to the U.S. Congress warning of the threat to Israel from the nuclear agreement that President Obama was patching up with Iran at the time. Dermer was likely involved in writing the oft-quoted line: “the days when the Jewish people remained passive in the face of genocidal enemies, those days are over.”
Richman concludes that these eight stories are “part of a broader saga: one of freedom and democracy, of Jewish and American ideas playing out in the world, of an invisible baton passed from generation to generation.” With Israel’s right to exist still fiercely questioned in many places, but never so firmly inscribed in the concert of nations, Richman inveighs against present and future generations for “resting on the laurels of History.” Israeli Jews are increasingly disconnected from the quest that sprang from Herzl’s mind, continued through the diplomacy of Weizmann and Meir, and defended at gunpoint in three wars over the course of as many decades. They take Israel for granted, and even frown upon the Jewish religiosity that instills Zionism with meaning. Some—particularly in the first-world diaspora—are too afraid to speak up for their beliefs amidst woke political correctness, whilst others are even falling prey to antisemitism dressed up as anti-Zionism. Richman’s book hopes to work against this by kindling a “renewed commitment” to serve as the “trustees of History.” These stories, he writes, “are evidence that History is neither an impersonal nor an inevitable process, but rather the record of what individuals do, some inspired by their belief in God, others by their unwillingness to await further divine tarrying, still others by a humanistic belief that they alone were there to act.” For Israel, History never ended—it has barely begun.
