Henrietta Szold & the Return to Zion

Last year the Tel Aviv Museum of Art mounted an exhibition, entitled “Shattered Hopes and Roads Not Taken,” of a dozen monumental drawings by the Israeli artist Netta Lieber Sheffer, who lives and works in Tel Aviv. The drawings are an expression of a wish on the Jewish left that history had not made Israel the prosperous, powerful, ethnically restricted, violence-plagued, and widely despised state that it is today. Could there have been another, more peaceful, more inclusive way of establishing a substantial Jewish presence in the Holy Land? One of the drawings showed a group of Jews in a modest wooden boat: members of Brit Shalom, an organization founded in 1925 that advocated for peaceful relations between Jews and Arabs and for the creation of a binational state in Palestine (see illustration on page 37). Among them was Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America.

Though she is not widely remembered today, in her lifetime Szold was, perhaps along with Louis Brandeis, the most famous American Zionist. She was deeply involved in creating a middle-class Jewish life for the children and grandchildren of millions of poor, Yiddish-speaking, observant Eastern European Jews who came to the United States beginning in the 1880s. More significantly, she helped transform the Jewish population of Palestine from a small group living in desperate conditions to a large and established community that could provide a home for Jews with no place else to go. She died in 1945, three years before the founding of the State of Israel, so we can’t know how she would have greeted its advent. But one lesson of her life is that “Zionism” can have a range of meanings.

Szold’s parents were born in Hungary. Her father, Benjamin Szold, was a rabbi who immigrated to Baltimore in 1859 to take charge of a synagogue there. Her mother, Sophie Schaar, had been a student of his when he was a private tutor. Benjamin and Sophie Szold came of age when, for the first time in thousands of years, it had only recently become possible for at least some Jews to function as full-fledged members of a larger society. (The historian Michael Meyer refers to the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who died in 1786, as “the first Jew to participate prominently in modern European culture.”)

This was an enormous and daunting change. Where you lived, what kind of work you did, what you wore, whom you married, how you were educated, what you ate, how you prayed, which laws bound you, and in what manner you were born, married, and were buried were questions that for Jews had long been mainly resolved within a closed, self-governing Jewish community.

As that community became less subject to external restrictions, a much broader range of answers to these questions became possible. Another figure portrayed in one of Lieber Sheffer’s drawings was Abraham Geiger, a mid-nineteenth-century German rabbi who was an architect of what we now call Reform Judaism and who was known for his anti-Zionism. (By “Zionism” I don’t mean Theodor Herzl’s use of the word, beginning in the 1890s, to describe his movement advocating for the creation of an independent Jewish state, but rather the ancient concept of a Jewish homeland that diaspora Jews wish to restore and return to.) As early as 1818 the first major Reform congregation, in Hamburg, had stopped praying for the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem. In 1854 Geiger edited a new prayer book for his congregation in Breslau that removed all traditional references to the fervent hope for a return to Zion.

He did this at a moment when both the urgent need for Jews to escape persecution in Europe and the possibility of establishing a home for millions of them in Palestine—then part of the Ottoman Empire and with a largely Arab population—seemed far-fetched. (By the late nineteenth century, conditions for Jews in Europe had changed for the worse: racialized antisemitism and pogroms were on the rise.) The Zionism that Geiger was renouncing implied a tribal idea of Jewish identity—of Jews as a people rather than as members of a religion—that he hoped to transcend. He believed that Judaism could be substantially modified without losing its hold on its increasingly assimilated adherents. The first stirrings of Reform Judaism in Germany in the early nineteenth century produced a series of alterations in Jewish law that were meant to make Judaism easier to practice and more reassuring to Gentiles. Temples installed organs and choirs, replaced bar mitzvahs with confirmations, held services in German rather than Hebrew, cut back on weekly Torah readings, and flirted with moving the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday.

The innovations of Reform Judaism produced a counterreaction: the emergence, first in Germany and later in the US, of the versions of Judaism we call Conservative and Modern Orthodox. The founding father of what would become Conservative Judaism, Zacharias Frankel, presided over the seminary in Breslau where Benjamin Szold completed his studies. Frankel retained the references to a return to Zion in the liturgy and advocated against Reform Judaism’s abandonment of other traditional practices. Temple Oheb Shalom, the congregation Szold led in Baltimore, was Reform, because that was what its mainly German-born members wanted, but he became increasingly uncomfortable with the movement’s evolution.

In 1883, when Hebrew Union College, the new Reform seminary in Cincinnati, graduated its first class of rabbis, Szold was one of the speakers, and his twenty-two-year-old daughter Henrietta was also there as a correspondent for The Jewish Messenger. The banquet after the ceremony was nonkosher; both Szolds were horrified. In 1885 the American Reform movement’s elders gathered in Pittsburgh to draft a platform, which formally abandoned all Jewish dietary laws—and also Zionism:

We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.

This was a decade before Herzl’s embrace of political Zionism.

The goal of this prestate version of anti-Zionism, then, was to normalize and universalize Judaism as an ordinary religious denomination instead of a kahal, or separate community. In the US and Germany, Reform Jews dreamed of full acceptance by non-Jewish elites, which would involve not just dropping many of the inconvenient elements of Jewish religious practice and those that seemed peculiar to non-Jews but also changing Jews’ loyalties and self-conception. The year after the Pittsburgh Platform was adopted, the Jewish Theological Seminary, modeled on Frankel’s seminary in Breslau, was founded in New York and became the rabbinical training ground and intellectual home of the American Conservative movement. Benjamin Szold tried unsuccessfully to persuade his congregation in Baltimore to abandon classical Reform Judaism, then limped along to retirement as a rabbi profoundly out of tune with his membership.

Henrietta, the eldest and most brilliant of the Szolds’ five daughters, was formally educated only through high school and lived at home with her parents until she was in her early thirties. By the 1880s, when she was in her twenties, she was strongly attracted to Zionism. She disliked the Reform movement’s watering down of traditional Jewish observance and identified strongly with the Eastern European Jews who had begun to arrive in the United States and whose presence made many assimilated, affluent German Jews uncomfortable. She embraced “Zionism” as a kind of code word for an all-encompassing Jewish identity—a sense of solidarity and shared peoplehood with all Jews no matter where they lived or what they were like—and for a commitment to traditional Jewish observance. For a Szold-style Zionist, Jewishness should pervade a Jew’s daily life, as expressed in the famous line in the Book of Deuteronomy: “When thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.”

This version of Jewishness, to Szold, was inseparable from a deep sense of attachment to the Holy Land. Palestine would be a refuge for persecuted Jews fleeing Europe, and it would furthermore be the site of a great revival of traditional Jewish culture. This included Hebrew, which had not been a spoken language in over two thousand years. Its vital presence in the Holy Land would enrich the Jewish life of the entire diaspora and quell the temptations of assimilation, which Szold considered “Jewish self-negation.” In 1903, when Herzl promoted the British government’s offer of land for a Jewish state in Uganda, Szold was completely opposed: it was the wrong location.

In 1896, just before Herzl published Der Judenstaat, which laid out his arguments for a Jewish state, Szold delivered a Zionist lecture to the Baltimore chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women. According to a legend repeated in two new biographies—Francine Klagsbrun’s Henrietta Szold: Hadassah and the Zionist Dream and Dvora Hacohen’s To Repair a Broken World: The Life of Henrietta Szold, Founder of Hadassah—one of the delegates at Herzl’s First Zionist Congress in 1897 in Basel remarked that he knew of only two Zionists in the United States: Szold and Stephen Wise, a Reform rabbi in New York. Klagsbrun describes Szold’s version of Judaism as “a complete system of living that could have its greatest fulfillment in the Land of Israel.” Hacohen quotes Szold:

The Jew [is] occupied with the questions, political, social, ideal, that are at once summed up and solved in the word Zion—Zion, that is, the mountain of the house of the Lord, to which the nations shall flow to be taught the ways of the God of Jacob, to walk in His paths.

One can argue that Herzl and Szold were radically different figures representing different visions of Zionism and Jewishness. Herzl was assimilated and secular. Szold was deeply religious and opposed to assimilation. But in practice it was difficult to separate cleanly Herzl’s “political” Zionism and Szold’s “cultural” Zionism. When, for example, admirers of Herzl’s founded the Federation of American Zionists in the early years of the twentieth century, Szold unhesitatingly became its secretary and a member of its executive committee. Both Szold’s and Herzl’s followers (he died in 1904), in their different ways, pushed relentlessly for a close identification of Zionism with Palestine and for Jewish immigration and institution-building there, even though they were well aware of the intense Arab opposition to it. Everything Szold did helped lay the foundation for the establishment of the State of Israel, even if she never explicitly called for a Jewish state.

It’s also the case that cultural Zionism—the kind of Zionism that Lieber Sheffer’s drawings are meant to celebrate—was always a tiny movement. According to the Israeli historian Benny Morris, Brit Shalom “never had more than several dozen members,” and its 1940s successor, Ihud, had only ninety-seven.¹ In retrospect a deep and abiding commitment to the Jewish project in Palestine, whatever the motivation and anticipated end point, seems as important as the narrower question of statehood. In any case, in Szold’s youth the distinction between Zionists and non-Zionists was far more significant than the distinctions among types of Zionism.

In 1893 Szold was hired as a secretary—or underpaid workhorse—by the fledgling Jewish Publication Society. After her father died in 1902, she petitioned the Jewish Theological Seminary to enroll in its rabbinical training program. Solomon Schechter, the head of the seminary, told her she could study there but could not be ordained. (The Conservative movement didn’t ordain female rabbis until the 1980s.) So she moved to New York, where, on assignment from the Jewish Publication Society, she began working with Louis Ginzberg, a Lithuanian-born rabbi and a member of the JTS faculty, on his multivolume Legends of the Jews, a vast compilation of the ancient Jewish tales, speculative riffs, and suppositional elaborations called Aggadah. Ginzberg wrote in German. Szold served as a minimally credited organizer and translator. She also fell hopelessly in love with him.

On a visit to Berlin in 1908, Ginzberg met and quickly became engaged to Adele Katzenstein, who was thirteen years younger than him; Szold was thirteen years older. Although it seems as if Szold and Ginzberg were not lovers in the physical sense, it also seems impossible that Ginzberg could have been unaware of how she felt about him. She was so emotionally and physically devastated by the news of his engagement, and then by the news that Adele was pregnant, that her vision began to deteriorate. The indifferent or clueless Ginzberg had no trouble asking her to continue working for him.

The following year, as part of her effort to get over Ginzberg, Szold and her mother took an extended trip to Europe and the Middle East, including Palestine. Already there were thirty Jewish agricultural settlements there, populated mainly by Eastern European Jews who had fled terrible conditions, including pogroms; a defense force called the Hashomer protected them from attacks by their Arab neighbors. The Szolds visited fourteen settlements, as well as the desperately poor Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem and Jaffa. In a report Szold wrote a few years after this trip, she said there were 100,000 Jews in Palestine (up from 25,000 in 1880), out of a total, mainly Arab, population of 700,000.²

Szold is usefully thought of as a member of the generation of American female social reformers who led the settlement house movement. Like Jane Addams of Hull House in Chicago and Lillian Wald of the Henry Street Settlement in New York, she devoted her life to establishing institutions that would help the poor directly. In 1889 Szold started a night school in Baltimore for Eastern European Jewish immigrants, where she helped them adjust to American life. The activities of Hadassah, which she founded in 1912 after she finally stopped working for Ginzberg, were undertaken in the same spirit, but in Palestine. Its first major project, setting up a visiting nurse service, was modeled on Wald’s at Henry Street.

Hadassah became the leading Jewish women’s organization in the United States. From the start, it called itself Zionist. By the time Szold died, it was the largest Zionist organization in the world. Hadassah’s decision to make Zionism the central organizing principle of its proliferating local chapters in the United States was another example of the schism between Reform and Conservative Judaism. The National Council of Jewish Women, founded in 1893, was Reform and non-Zionist; it focused on good works in the United States, not in Palestine. For Hadassah, the concept of Zionism was less a political cause than a pastoral one, as well as a cultural and spiritual binding agent for American Jewish women: it promoted a more ethnic, less comfortable diasporic Jewish identity than the council offered. (Hadassah is the Hebrew name of Esther, the heroine of the Purim story; New York’s Purim Association, dominated by Reform Jews, dissolved a decade before Hadassah was founded, partly because the Purim celebration was too noisy and martial for Reform sensibilities.) It turned out that Jewish women in America were especially motivated to participate in specifically Jewish good works aimed at helping Jews they’d never met who lived halfway around the world.

As Hadassah’s activities in Palestine expanded—it created a large network of doctors, nurses, and hospitals, and eventually a nursing school—it required more and more money, far beyond what donations from its working-class and middle-class members in the US could provide. Szold, a tireless and effective fundraiser, was able to persuade the country’s leading Jewish philanthropists, who were male, German, and Reform, to support Hadassah. One of the curiosities of the early, prestate period of American Zionism is why these men, who considered themselves anti-Zionist, supported a Zionist women’s organization. Daniel Schulman’s The Money Kings, an extensively researched history of the American German Jewish elite in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focuses on their businesses, but it also helps explain their philanthropic motives.

German Jews who came to the United States during the quarter-century before the Civil War usually started out as peddlers and merchants and ended up as retailers or bankers. The most spectacularly successful of them—families like the Schiffs, Seligmans, Lehmans, Warburgs, and Loebs—formed a tight cohort in which intermarriage was common. Unlike Szold, they did not welcome the poor Eastern European Jews who began arriving in much greater numbers in the 1880s. They believed that the visible presence of the new immigrants in urban slums would imperil the full acceptance into the non-Jewish elite that they felt was within their grasp.

Delegations of German Jews occasionally visited the White House to lobby the president to pressure Russia to treat its Jews better—partly out of genuine humanitarian concern, partly in the hope that fewer of them would want to immigrate. They financed schemes to persuade poor Jews to leave the slums and become farmers or to settle in the middle of the country rather than on the urban East Coast. They supported settlement houses. They founded Di yidische velt (The Jewish World), a Republican-leaning, less Zionist, less bumptious alternative to Forverts and the rest of New York’s Yiddish newspapers; its tone did not comport with the mood of its intended audience, and it went out of business. They helped create the Joint Distribution Committee, which aided non-American Jews in need. Although they were Reform, they helped the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary establish itself, partly because they thought it might encourage the immigrants and their children to adopt a way of being Jewish that included wearing conventional clothing, speaking English, and studying nonreligious subjects in school.

Pre-Israel Palestine appealed to American German Jewish philanthropists as an alternative destination for European Jewish refugees. The Holy Land’s transformative effects were also attractive: almost overnight, it seemed, Yiddish-speaking, bearded and bewigged, observant shtetl dwellers were becoming muscular, bronzed, secular Hebrew-speakers living on kibbutzim and in moshavim, tilling the soil as many European Jews had been forbidden to do for centuries. And Szold’s insistence that Hadassah’s services be available to Muslim and Christian clients as well as to Jews struck a universalist note that was especially important to American German Jews (who were also major funders of civil rights organizations in the US such as the NAACP).

It would be wrong to ignore the compassion of these philanthropists, but this should not be mistaken for a sense of solidarity with poor Jews in or recently arrived from Eastern Europe. One of Felix Warburg’s sons wrote about his father, “He disliked almost everything about the Jews except their problems.” One of Szold’s closest allies, Judah Magnes, left his post as a rabbi at the German Jews’ grand religious headquarters, Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue in New York, because of the congregation’s discomfort over his Zionism and his advocacy of a return to the bar mitzvah and other traditional religious practices. In 1922 Magnes moved to Palestine, where he spent most of the rest of his life, mainly as president of Hebrew University. (He was one of the liberal cultural Zionists depicted in Lieber Sheffer’s drawings.) But just two years after he left Temple Emanu-El, the first important meeting to organize Hadassah was held there: Zionism was worth supporting, as long as the cultural and religious practices associated with it took place elsewhere.

Szold traveled constantly between Palestine and the United States, especially after the death of her mother in 1916. In 1917 Great Britain established military rule in Palestine just weeks after it issued the Balfour Declaration endorsing the establishment of a Jewish homeland there. Conditions for Jews in Eastern Europe were getting worse. Szold and the other early Zionists, in addition to their efforts to improve conditions and create institutions in Palestine, relentlessly urged the usually reluctant British officials to permit more Jewish migration there. When the United States, which had been the main destination for Jews leaving Eastern Europe, enacted severe immigration restrictions in 1924, the pressure to allow more Jews into Palestine increased.

There was periodic, escalating violence between Arabs and Jews in the 1920s and 1930s. The Arab leadership, aware that the population balance in Palestine was changing significantly, lobbied the British to limit Jewish migration, while the Jewish leadership was lobbying to increase it. In 1939, after the Arabs rejected a partition plan, the British government issued a white paper that withdrew the promise of a Jewish homeland and severely limited Jewish migration to and Jewish land purchases in Palestine. Meanwhile the situation for Jews in Europe was becoming dire; Zionists in Palestine (though not Szold) increasingly turned to illegal means of Jewish immigration and to violent tactics against the British.

Szold’s crowning achievement was directing the Palestine operations of Youth Aliyah, a program that brought Jewish teenagers from Germany and other Nazi-controlled areas and resettled them on kibbutzim. She began this work, which required ceaseless fundraising in the United States, organizing in Palestine, and negotiating in Europe, in 1933 at the age of seventy-three and continued until she died at eighty-four. By that time, Youth Aliyah had brought more than 10,000 Jews to Palestine.

Would Szold, a lifelong cultural Zionist, have embraced political Zionism if she had lived to see the establishment of Israel in 1948? Would she, that is, have officially endorsed or opposed the new state? Her biographers give different answers. Klagsbrun insists that until the end of her life she “still dreamed of a single state where Jews and Arabs might live together in harmony.” It isn’t clear whether Szold was an official member of Brit Shalom, which fell apart by 1933, but Klagsbrun considers her to have been a de facto member. In the 1940s, Klagsbrun writes, Szold was a leader and full-fledged member of Ihud, another group of Jewish intellectuals who were in favor of a binational state. But Hacohen writes that while the members of Brit Shalom considered Szold to be one of them, she found their views “naïve and unrealistic” and believed that “the Jews stood little chance of flourishing in a binational state.” A much earlier biography, Henrietta Szold: Record of a Life (1952) by Rose Zeitlin, with an introduction by one of Szold’s sisters, splits the difference by claiming that as she lay dying, Szold summoned Magnes, the leading cultural Zionist, and Chaim Weizmann, the leading political Zionist, to her bedside and had the three of them clasp hands as she passed from this world to the next.

Even if Klagsbrun’s account is the most accurate, it wouldn’t make Szold into a fully plausible avatar of what many Jews on the left today, especially in the United States, would consider a usable past. She occasionally indulged in the fantasy of many liberal Zionists of her generation that Palestine was unpopulated. In 1922 she wrote to her family in Baltimore about a car trip to Haifa: “For five hours and a half we flew through an empty, deserted country. What harm to the Arabs if Jews develop it?” But for the most part she was well aware that bitter conflict was embedded in the creation of Jewish settlements in Palestine (which she enthusiastically endorsed), long before there was a Jewish state. Szold-style cultural Zionism entailed seeing Jews as embodying a kind of moral purity that required holiness, good works, and the dream of peace, not the traditional appurtenances of a state, like bureaucracies, laws, and armies. Still, building the Jewish presence in prestate Palestine was inescapably political, requiring negotiations with officials and management of tensions between groups. Arab–Jewish violence was intermittent during all of Szold’s time in Palestine. The more Jews arrived, especially after the Nazis took power in Germany, the worse the violence became. In the years immediately after Szold’s death, two of her closest aides, Chaim Yassky and Hans Beyth, were murdered while working there during the 1948 war.

Szold’s attitude toward the Arabs seems to have been some combination of sympathy and fear. She was frustrated that the hawkish wing of the Yishuv—the prestate Jewish community—made things more difficult than they had to be, and she never gave up hope that the conflict could somehow be resolved. During the 1936 Arab revolt, which came in response to the arrival of more Jewish refugees from Europe, she wrote:

The fears of the Arabs are not groundless. Our peaceful endeavors in our own behalf have pressed them to the wall. The first requisite is that we should be honest and sincere in our desire to live on terms of equality with them in this land on which we have a shadowy (in the political sense) but a strong sentimental claim, and upon which they have the claim which is phrased: possession is nine points of the law.

A few weeks later she wrote, “I see the future dark…. Is there no Arab side to the problem? Is it not our business to see the Arab side, too, and think out the necessary adjustment? Or am I a wishy-washy Liberal?”

Still, Szold always did everything she could to bring more Jewish refugees to Palestine and to promote the idea that Zionism—which she saw as a strong emotional connection to Palestine and the building of a Jewish society there—was essential to Jewish identity in the diaspora. As a result she saved many Jewish lives, contributed substantially to the creation of Jewish institutions in Palestine, and helped Jewish communal life in America to thrive during the first half of the twentieth century. Her writings demonstrate that she was aware of the trouble all this would cause in Palestine. Her actions demonstrate that Zionism was nonetheless her overwhelming priority.

The establishment of the State of Israel led immediately to war with its Arab neighbors and to substantial Jewish migration from Eastern Europe—where pogroms had started again and Jews living in displaced person camps had nowhere else to go—as well as from Libya, Iran, Yemen, and other Middle Eastern countries. In the United States, the home of the great majority of diaspora Jews, Zionism became the dominant stance of the leading Jewish organizations and the institutions of Jewish community life. Today one would be hard put to find a flourishing synagogue that operates without any reference to Zionism or Israel, as the old Reform temples used to do.

Reform Judaism is once again the largest Jewish denomination in the United States, partly because it has buried its Pittsburgh Platform origins. The Holocaust was obviously the main reason its founding position disintegrated. In 1937 the movement—which in 1917 had officially condemned the Balfour Declaration—produced a new platform that officially removed its longtime renunciation of Zionism. Magnes, who began his career as too Zionist for the Reform movement, ended it as too anti-Zionist, only reluctantly acceding to the creation of the State of Israel. He was highly controversial among Hebrew University faculty and the leadership of Hadassah, which lost seventy-eight medical aid workers in the Arab attack that killed Chaim Yassky. In 1941 Hadassah issued a statement calling for a Jewish state, something it hadn’t taken a position on previously, and repudiating the binational aspirations of Magnes and his allies. Just before Israel declared its independence, Magnes, who was in poor health, returned to the United States for medical treatment. He died in New York in late 1948.

American Jews are an overwhelmingly liberal group politically, and most Jews in the postwar years chose to see Zionism as a liberal cause: Israel was a refuge for oppressed people, a miracle of society-building in the desert, with a social democratic government. For the two or three generations of American Jews who were raised on such assumptions, the fact that Israel today has a strongly right-wing government and that Zionism is anathema to most of the global left is profoundly upsetting. That explains the revival of Jewish interest in cultural Zionism, or of binationalism, as roads not taken (as expressed by the title of Lieber Sheffer’s exhibition in Tel Aviv).

One often hears the worry from Jews on the left that reflexive support of Israel by mainstream Jewish organizations will imperil the future of Jewish life in America by driving a younger generation away. Israel’s conduct of its wars in Gaza and Lebanon has made this concern especially intense. At the same time, it is true that the major past attempt to separate Zionism from American Jewish identity and practice failed—not because of Israel’s policies but because events in the world undercut its assumptions and because it surrendered so much of Yiddishkeit that Judaism lost its hold on its members. As long ago as 1967, Stephen Birmingham ended his gossipy best seller Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York, a collective portrait of roughly the same group as Daniel Schulman’s “money kings,” with the observation that most of the elite German Jewish families had abandoned Judaism entirely. They were giving their children first names like Peters and Bradford.

Szold’s version of Zionism began out of concern for Jewish assimilation in the United States that was motivated by opportunity and the desire to appease antisemites. Hacohen writes, “Szold believed there was only one solution: Zionism. Antisemitism would disappear when the Jews had their own country.” This has not come true, to say the least. Neither did the early German and American Reform Jews’ prediction that their renunciation of Zionism would cause antisemitism to disappear.

Israel, home to just under half the world’s Jews, has a high degree of internal political contention, especially under its right-wing government, but the idea of replacing the explicitly Jewish state that has existed for more than three quarters of a century with a new state in which Jews would be in the minority would have minimal support there. The most interesting question that the life of Henrietta Szold poses today is less about the future of Israel, which is not likely to renounce its statehood, than about the future of Judaism in the diaspora, especially the United States. In founding Hadassah as an American organization that did its work in Palestine, Szold demonstrated her conviction that a connection to the Holy Land would be profoundly meaningful to most American Jews. That was not conventional wisdom at the time, but it proved correct: American Jewish community life became centrally Zionist, first in the sense of orientation toward Jewish life in Palestine, then in the sense of strong support for the Jewish state.

The current moment raises the opposite question: Can there be a strong communal Jewish life in the United States that is non-Zionist or anti-Zionist? It would be an enormous project to establish one with the scale and the durability of the institutional network of which Hadassah has been an important part. One reason is that it would also be a mundane project. If you belong to a synagogue, you know that in a thriving Jewish community, somebody always has to organize the kiddush and collect the High Holy Day pledges. At a higher level, there’s the question of how profound, how particular, Jewish identity has to be to flourish. Szold may hold up well as a heroic and admirable figure, but her answer to that question—very profound and very particular, with intense bonds of loyalty between American Jews and Jews in Israel—wouldn’t be comfortable to many Jewish Americans today.