Nahum Goldmann

Statesman without a State

Edited by Mark A. Raider

Subjects: Israel Studies, Intellectual History, Jewish Studies
Series: SUNY series in Israeli Studies
Paperback : 9781438425009, 353 pages, January 2010
Hardcover : 9781438424996, 353 pages, April 2009

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Table of contents

Preface
Mark A. Raider
Part I. Statesman

1. Nahum Goldmann:Jewish and Zionist Statesman
Jehuda Reinharz and Evyatar Friesel
Part II. Thinker
2. Nahum Goldmann as Zionist Thinker
Gideon Shimoni
3. Negation of the Galut and the Centrality of Israel: Nahum Goldmann and David Ben Gurion
Yosef Gorny
Part III. Maverick
4. The German Years:Early Chapters in the Biography of a Jewish Statesman
Michael Brenner
5. Nahum Goldmann and The First Two Decades of the World Jewish Congress
Zohar Segev
6. Nahum Goldmann and Chaim Weizmann: An Ambivalent “Relationship”
Jehuda Reinharz
7. Idealism, Vision, and Pragmatism:Stephen S. Wise, Nahum Goldmann, and Abba Hillel Silver in the United States
Mark A. Raider
8. Toward the Partition of Palestine:The Goldmann Mission in Washington, August 1946
Evyatar Friesel
Part IV. Leader

9. Nahum Goldmann and Germany after World War II
Shlomo Shafir
10. “Reparations Made Me”:Nahum Goldmann, German Reparations, and the Jewish World
Ronald W. Zweig
11. Nahum Goldmann and the Establishment of the Diaspora Museum
Dina Porat
12. Leadership of Accommodation or Protest?:Nahum Goldmann and the Struggle for Soviet Jewry
Suzanne D. Rutland
13. Goldmann’s Initiative to Meet with Nasser in 1970
Meir Chazan
List of Contributors
Index

Explores the life and career of one of the twentieth century’s most colorful Zionist leaders.

Description

The life, career, and legacy of Nahum Goldmann (1895–1982), one of the most colorful and important Zionist leaders of the twentieth century, are fully revealed in this illuminating collection of essays. American, Israeli, and European scholars speak to the many sides of Goldmann, including his upbringing, rise in the international public arena as a premier advocate for Jewish life and the Zionist enterprise, and his role as an elder statesman in the 1960s and 1970s. Often ahead of his time, Goldmann proved highly influential at several critical historical junctures—on the eve of the creation of the Jewish state, he played a key role articulating Israel's relationship with diaspora Jewry, postwar Germany, and the Arab world. This volume captures Goldmann in all his complexity, while making this important figure and his time accessible to researchers, students, and interested readers.

Mark A. Raider is Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Cincinnati and Visiting Professor of American Jewish History at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion. He is the author of The Emergence of American Zionism. He is also the coeditor of Abba Hillel Silver and American Zionism (with Jonathan D. Sarna and Ron Zweig); The Plough Woman: Records of the Pioneer Women of Palestine, A Critical Edition (with Miriam B. Raider-Roth); and American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise (with Shulamit Reinharz).

Reviews

"…this long-overdue book on Goldmann fills a gap in Zionist historiography … It adds an excellent contribution to the growing literature on the relationship of American Jewry and Jews in other parts of the Diaspora to the state of Israel." — H-Net Reviews