Podcast: Allan Arkush on Ahad Ha’am and “The Jewish State and Jewish Problem” (Rebroadcast)

This Week’s Guest: Allan Arkush

In an 1897 essay called “The Jewish State and Jewish Problem,” the Zionist writer Aḥad Ha’am argued that “Judaism needs at present but little. It needs not an independent state, but only the creation in its native land of conditions favorable to its development: a good-sized settlement of Jews working without hindrance in every branch of culture, from agriculture and handicrafts to science and literature.” Aḥad Ha’am believed that the most powerful arguments for Zionism were not economic but moral, and in his many essays he stressed the importance of forming a modern Jewish identity from authentically Jewish culture and ideas. Culture first, sovereignty later, in other words.

Aḥad Ha’am was born in 1856 this week by the name Asher Ginsburg, and so we thought we’d mark the occasion by rebroadcasting a conversation about him between the Tikvah Fund’s executive director Eric Cohen and Allan Arkush, a professor of Judaic studies at Binghamton University and the senior contributing editor at the Jewish Review of Books. The two discuss Aḥad Ha’am’s background, his ideas in this essay and elsewhere, and compare them to those of his more politically minded Zionist rivals, primarily Theodor Herzl.