Of my thousand-plus non-fiction books about Israel, there’s one, I believe, that belongs in the home library of every Jew, and that seminal book is Herzl’s Jewish State. Chaim Weizmann’s Foreword to a 1943 edition I have calls it in part a naive little book. It wasn’t the first book with its call, but it resonated with Europe’s Jewish grassroots, and in the end it launched a thousand ships, all right, the bulk of them British destroyers. If you’re a Jew, Herzl’s little book belongs on your home’s bookshelf as a testament that we Jewish people too demand and have our homeland state in that land where our forefathers established our peoplehood and left their mark on the world.
Ok, I undertook reading this, almost 500 pages, as a self-inflicted test of commitment to Zionism. It turned out a moving read, a far deeper view of this comet that flashed across Jewish history’s skies, and of his relentless pursuit of international recognition of our people’s homeland, than one gleans from his thin Jewish State. After convening the first Jewish Congress in Basel in 1897, he wrote here that at Basel he had founded the Jewish state, that if he said so aloud everyone would laugh, but that in fifty years everyone would perceive it. In 1947, fifty years to the year, with the UN’s vote to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, everyone did.
If there’s a second book also belonging on a grassroots American Jewish household’s book shelf, it’s Chaim Weizmann’s auto-biography, Trial and Error. He differed very much from Ben-Gurion in many ways, but his lifelong tireless efforts, highlighted by his long leadership of the Zionist movement, his involvement in securing the Balfour Declaration and his White House meetings with President Trump in the runup to the UN partition vote were crucial. As a mark of respect to this giant of the Zionist movement and of our own commitment today to our right to our homeland, his book belongs on our bookshelves.
