The Self-Actualizing Zionism of A.D. Gordon

How a philosopher who had never before engaged in hard physical work moved to Palestine, became an ascetic day laborer, and inspired a movement.

This, the eighth essay by Hillel Halkin in his series on seminal Hebrew writers of the 19th and early-20th centuries, is devoted to two figures: the novelist Yosef Ḥayyim Brenner (1881-1921) and the philosopher A.D. Gordon (1856-1922): “friends, mutual admirers, and public disputants.”

We present this essay in two consecutive parts: the first, yesterday, focuses mainly on Brenner, and the second, today, mainly on Gordon and on the pair’s disagreements.

The preceding seven essays in Halkin’s series have dealt one by one with the novelists Joseph Perl, Avraham Mapu, and Peretz Smolenskin, the poets Yehudah Leib Gordon and Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik, the essayist and Zionist thinker Ahad Ha’am, and the writer, journalist, and intellectual Micha Yosef Berdichevsky.

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