A Heroic Mother In Israel

At a time when ‘Zionism’ has become a dirty word, an illuminating new biography of Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah, is all the more important.

A complex woman: Szold, a Zionist icon, called for Palestine to be a bipartisan state, with equal rights for Arabs and Jews.

Dear Reader,

The wave of anti-Semitism that swept college campuses this spring has hit the literary world as well, targeting a number of Jewish authors as “Zionists,” whether or not they have expressed views on the Israel-Hamas war. Those “Zionists,” as well as Israeli and pro-Israel writers, have been excluded from literary events, awards ceremonies, book signings and writers conferences.

Erika Dreifus, a New York-based “literary advocate” whose Substack newsletter (The Practicing Writer: 2.0) keeps track of writing opportunities for Jewish writers, says that anti-Israel sentiment has become “a tidal wave” in the wake of the war, often morphing into anti-Semitism.

The Jewish Book Council has begun to monitor and report on anti-Semitism aimed at Jewish writers with the hope that the effort will raise awareness and lead to systemic change.

Most recently, the Authors Guild has come out with a statement condemning “censoring, threatening or blacklisting authors.”

With this in mind, I plan to highlight several recent, first-rate, Jewish-related books to give them the attention they deserve, and provide at least a measure of the exposure they should be – but are not – getting these days through mainstream book reviews, author interviews, etc.

I am proud to start with a book by a dear friend and prize-winning author whose distinguished career includes more than 25 years as an insightful columnist for The Jewish Week.

Gary

Francine Klagsbrun, author of the award-winning biography of Golda Meir (“Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel”), has followed that masterpiece with a poignant biography of another American-born Jewish woman whose influence on Israeli society and American Jewry in the 20th century was profound, if less heralded.

In “Henrietta Szold: Hadassah and the Zionist Dream” (Yale University Press), Klagsbrun combines her painstaking research and clear writing style to tell the remarkable story of a woman who, born and raised in Baltimore in 1860, rebounded from a heartbreaking, unrequited love and went on to found Hadassah, the largest Jewish-membership organization in America, in 1912. Late in life she led the effort to resettle, educate and train young Jews escaping from the Nazis through Youth Aliyah in Palestine in the 1930s and ‘40s, saving thousands of lives. Along the way she revolutionized adult education in America and offered a vision of Israel as a bipartisan state, with equal rights for Arabs and Jews. 

It’s easy to see why Klagsbrun, a member of Hadassah Magazine’s editorial board and author of 10 non-fiction books, was approached to write Szold’s biography for Yale University Press’s “Jewish Lives” series. Her work reflects a deep knowledge of Jewish ideas and values as well as the discipline to ensure historical authenticity.

Initially, though, Klagsbrun declined the offer.

“I thought of Henrietta as a saintly woman, a kind of goody-goody” whose professional achievements were laudatory but whose personal story might lack dramatic tension.

“But when I looked into it a little deeper,” Klagsbrun told me this week, “I got more interested.”  She came to see Szold as a driven, brilliant, deeply compassionate woman with a strong sense of morality and responsibility whose life played out as a drama in two distinct acts, one in America and one in Palestine. And with  all of her remarkable successes, Klagsbrun observes, Szold carried with her a sense of loneliness and self-doubt throughout her life.

A Powerful Sense Of Duty

In act one, Szold, the oldest of eight daughters, devoted herself to her father, a Hungarian-born rabbinic scholar, translating papers for him and helping him with his sermons and other secretarial skills, while also aiding her mother in tending to her seven younger sisters.

A brilliant student and valedictorian of her high school graduating class, Szold very much wanted to attend college, but that was not an option for women in Baltimore at the time and she was needed at home. 

Still, she managed to write for journals and teach a variety of subjects, including French, German, Latin and algebra, at several public, private and religious schools. She took on a more ambitious task in response to the large influx of Jews fleeing Russian persecution in the 1880s. Though looked down upon by Baltimore’s already assimilated German-American Jews, the newcomers were committed to their faith and eager to learn English and American culture. In 1889, Szold helped start a night school in Baltimore to teach them, starting with 30 adults. Within a few months there were 340 men, women and children in attendance. She oversaw the whole operation, planning the curriculum, hiring teachers and raising the funds. In time, the program was expanded to take in a wide range of immigrants, not just Jews, and it became the model of evening night schools for immigrants around the country. 

Szold also made her mark in calling for more recognition of women in both ritual and organizational Jewish life. As a young woman, she wrote to a relative: “If I were a man, I would make my voice heard.” Years later, in her 40s, she  did speak up. As “a pre-feminist,” in Klagsbrun’s words, Szold was the first woman to attend the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York – on their condition that she not serve as a rabbi. 

She also insisted on reciting Kaddish for her parents, respectfully declining the offer of a male family friend to fulfill the mitzvah. Szold’s reply, after the death of her mother in 1916, became “the most often cited … of all the things she wrote and said” in her thousands of letters and lectures, Klagsbrun noted.  

“I believe that the elimination of women from such duties was never intended by our law and custom,” Szold wrote. “It was never intended that, if they could perform” positive mitzvot, from which women are exempt according to traditional Jewish law, “their performance of them should not be as valuable and valid as when one of the male sex performed them. And of the Kaddish I feel sure this is particularly true. My mother had eight daughters and no son; and yet never did I hear a word of regret pass the lips of either my mother or my father that one of us was not a son. When my father died, my mother would not permit others to take her daughters’ place in saying the Kaddish, and so I am sure I am acting in her spirit when I am moved to decline your offer.”

It was at the Jewish Theological Seminary that Szold met and fell in love with Louis Ginzburg, a brilliant professor for whom she translated foreign books and organized lecture notes, helping him with his seminal work, “Legends of the Jews.” He was 29; she was 43. 

“There is still disagreement about whether he behaved toward her as a cad, callous and self-serving, or if she imagined feelings he did not pretend to have,” Klagsbrun writes. “The matter may never be resolved.”

What we do know, thanks to Klagbrun’s research, is that over a period of four years of close contact – working together, spending much alone time with each other and, in a letter she wrote but never mailed in which Szold poured out her love for Ginzburg – he returned from a trip abroad and broke the news to Szold that he was engaged. She had been expecting a marriage proposal. 

Devastated, Szold, who was working at the time at the Jewish Publication Society, took a leave of absence in 1909, and traveled to Europe and Palestine with her mother. It was during her six weeks in Palestine that she fell in love again – this time with the land and the vibrant spirit of the people she met. 

‘We Need Zionism’

Upon her return to New York, Szold began to work toward creating a Zionist group for women that would address the shockingly primitive living conditions she saw in Palestine, especially the lack of proper medical facilities for children and women. In 1912, she founded Hadassah, convinced that American Jewish women could strengthen their own spiritual renewal by helping the Jews of Palestine in practical ways. “We need Zionism as much as those Jews do who need a physical home,” she wrote to a friend. The initial project sent two nurses to Palestine to offer medical care, a first step that eventually resulted in Hadassah’s medical center that is the leading facility of its kind throughout the Middle East. 

Gradually, Hadassah grew as an organization in America, raising funds and influence as Szold accomplished “enormous achievements,” Klagsbrun notes, while consistently fending off pressure from male Zionist leaders to take credit, and funds, for Hadassah’s success in creating a public health and social welfare system for all of Palestine, both Arabs and Jews.

A genius for organizational skills in bringing her idealistic visions to fruition, Szold spent most of the last several decades of her life in Palestine, displaying the inner strength that allowed her to maintain her convictions, even when they were deeply unpopular.

For example, Szold held pacifist views during World War I, later defending the right of self-defense to Jews in Palestine only after Arabs began initiating violence there. Most strikingly, though she became a Zionist icon, Szold initially opposed Palestine becoming a Jewish state. In 1942, Szold and Judah Magnes, a prominent Reform rabbi, helped found Ihud (Hebrew for “unity”), a morality-based political party that called for Palestine to be a binational state, with full equality between Arabs and Jews. 

Szold predicted that “Zionism would fail if it did not eventually find a solution to the Arab-Jewish problem.”

She held her views even though a large majority of Hadassah women rejected Ihud and supported proposals for an independent Jewish state. 

After Ihud failed, Szold embraced Hadassah’s position. She died in 1945, three years before statehood.

(When I asked Klagsbrun what questions she would ask Szold today if she could, she said she was curious to know what Szold would say about the Israel that became a reality and its policies regarding the West Bank.)

 In preparing the biography, Klagsbrun had access to Hadassah’s archives and was able to read many hundreds of eloquent letters Szold wrote to family and others throughout her travels and travails. These insights helped Klagsbrun describe Szold as a three-dimensional figure, “always seeing herself as an American” though she lived in Palestine the last half of her life, and often melancholy and filled with self-doubt despite the adoration she received on both continents. 

“America no longer gave meaning to her life,” Klagsbrun observed. “She had found her soul in Palestine through the critical work she did there, and was not about to lose it again.”

Szold once wrote in a letter to a friend, “I should have had children, many children.” Though she never married or had children, many of the Youth Aliyah children she saved and stayed in touch with called her “mother.”

At her funeral Feb. 14, 1945, one of those children, a 15-year-old boy, recited Kaddish as Szold’s body was covered with the precious earth of Israel.

“It was a sad irony that this woman who never married or had children became known as a mother in Israel,” Klagsbrun noted.

Digging deep: Francine Klagsbrun’s biography of Szold includes 40 pages of index and notes.

A final note:

Klagsbrun is one of many Jewish writers today who feel that their books are intentionally getting less attention as a result of the Israel-Hamas war. She cited the fact that each of her previous 10 books received pre-publication reviews in one or two of the three main trade publications – Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Review and Library Journal – that play a key role in determining book sales. Her most recent biography of Golda Meir, published in 2017, received a review in each of the three publications and received the Jewish Book Council’s highest award that year.

“This is the first time a book of mine has not been reviewed” in any of the three trade publications, Klagsbrun said, “and I feel it’s not being treated the same” as her others. “It seems like ‘Zionism’ is a dirty word these days,” she said, pointing out that her new book is about a Zionist hero and the word ‘Zionist’ is in the subtitle.  

To date, the only mainstream review of the Szold book was in the Wall Street Journal, where reviewer Diane Cole noted at the outset that it “arrives at a moment when Zionism is once again a flashpoint for protest and provocation worldwide. It’s a timely reminder of Szold’s vision for a land that Jews and Arabs alike could call home.”

That’s the dream – and the problem: two peoples, one land. 

It will take a generation of leaders with Henrietta Szold’s talents, commitment and moral ideals for both peoples to share that home in peace.