I've been reading Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) because he's the most important political Jew of the last century or so, giving his short life to a heroic, "tragic" cause (his word) that he never saw come to life, a cause I likely would have joined were I a European of the early 1900s. Herzl is also an amazing character: grandiose and literary, with a desolate personal life, he reinvented himself from
being a newspaper feature writer to become the king of the Jews in the
space of a couple of years, alienating his professional community and beginning a hellbent and unending tour of European and Asian courts, using baksheesh and journalistic connections to try and win anti-Semitic princes to Zionism.
My interest in this character is shared by playwright David Zellnik. Herzl animates Zellnik's (magnificent) play Ariel Sharon Hovers Between Life and Death and Dreams about Theodor Herzl, which I saw in workshop a couple of years back and keep waiting to see performed. I sent Zellnik an email about Herzl to begin a dialogue. He wrote:
Yes, Herzl is a huge figure, one of the most relevant to understanding the current Middle East. I don’t know why his story is so under-known, under-dramatized. There is a lot to wrestle with and a lot to admire – I have great respect for anyone trying to save lives, which he surely tried to do and surely did. And whatever his flaws, you have to give it to him: he saw very clearly that Europe’s Jews were in grave danger.
My play is, on the whole, sympathetic to him… although the other major character in it is Ariel Sharon, and the play acts as a dialogue between the two – exploring their great differences but also their connection at opposite ends of the Zionist trajectory. And in doing so perhaps confuses some of the audience’s sympathy for Herzl (more on this later).
Herzl is commonly thought of a self-hating Jew/successful journalist who transformed himself into a Zionist prophet – who in the final 9 years of his life created a movement that would lead to the founding of Israel. My play respects this but does 2 things: it shows him as he often thought of himself – as an overlooked playwright – and also argues that his youthful self-hatred was never abandoned, merely reframed.
Herzl the Dramatist
OK, he was a lousy playwright. But the supreme irony is that while his actual plays tended to be shallow bedroom farces, he understood deeply the theatrical nature of politics. For instance, the First Zionist Congress: he made sure the Delegates wore black-tie formal wear, he “set-dressed” the casino it was held in for better press photos… and he dressed himself to look like a major leader. He knew he was operating without any firm support and so aimed to create an illusion of momentum in order to secure a state.
On a deep level he had a playwright’s desire to recast Jews from supporting players into the leads. Look at this quote from the Zionist journal:
“At bottom I am still the dramatist in all this I am taking ragged beggars off the streets, dressing them in magnificent costumes, and having them perform in a glorious pageant designed by me." [Herzl, Zionist Journal, 1895 p67]
Many of Herzl’s flaws arise as flip sides of this: his pompousness, his fastidiousness, his back-channel statecraft/stagecraft. Like you, I find his narcissism somewhat endearing – even a necessary trait for any great leader. But it leads me to a darker aspect of Herzl:
Herzl the Self-Hating Jew
Here’s where my play gets more controversial, and where your and my thoughts about Herzl might diverge. I think Herzl never abandoned his complicated self-hatred. Allow me to explain, since “Self-hating Jew” is an epithet that regularly gets thrown at Jews who question Israel. Here is a letter Herzl wrote at age 25:
“Yesterday at grand soiree at Treitel’s. Some thirty-forty ugly little Jews and Jewesses. Not a very edifying sight.”
[Herzl, Letter to parents, 11/25/85]
Yes, he was young then…and one should remember the great cultural divide between established German/Hungarian Jewish communities and Russian so-called “Shtetl Jews” then flooding the cities of Central Europe. But now look at what he wrote at age 35, on his path towards Zionism:
What is to be done? Whether the Jews emigrate or stay put, the race must be improved right on the spot. It must be made warlike, eager to work. And virtuous.
[Herzl, Zionist Journal, 1895 p19-22]
Still he bought the anti-Semites’ arguments that Jews are an inferior race (we aren’t “very eager to work” or “virtuous”).
As I see it, Herzl’s Zionism was really 2 projects: the humanitarian in him wanted a safe haven for persecuted Jews, but the part of him ashamed of being Jewish, of being connected to “ghetto Jews” wanted to remake Jews.
Zionism’s (self-)hatred of Diaspora Jewry is foundational. Look at this open letter he wrote in his own Zionist newspaper. He calls non-Zionists the same names our enemies did, with language to rival any anti-Semite:
“A kike is anti-Zionist…just merely to look at him, let alone approach or heaven forbid, touch him was enough to make us feel sick…
We sought extenuating, historical explanations for his being so crooked, sleazy, shabby a specimen… But who is this kike anyway, this Yid? A type, my dear friends, a figure that pops up time and again, the dreadful companion of the Jew, and so inseparable from him that they have always mistaken one for the other. The Jew is a human being like any other, no better, no worse…. The kike, on the other hand, is a hideous distortion of the human character., something unspeakably low and repulsive.
[Herzl, Open letter in “Die Welt,” his Zionist paper, Oct 15, 1897]
Here Herzl directly creates two classes of Jews – the ghetto Jews he still loathes and the good Jews who will naturally become Zionists. Along with Max Nordau, the Zionist movement’s second-in-command, Herzl subscribed to the idea that races can “degenerate” and Jews – without a leader and a country – had done just that.
This 19th Century idea of national character was widespread, not Herzl’s invention… and it has been discarded by almost every other Western country. Yet I would contend it still informs Zionist thinking: both in the idea that the Jewish People are redeemed by becoming citizens of a Jewish State (aliyah – immigrating to Israel – means “ascent”)… and in a worldview that can casually ascribe a national character to The Arabs (usually negative– okay always negative.)
To be fair, after Herzl saw Eastern European Jewish communities, he modified some of his views on the Jews there. But the idea of male weakness, of unmanliness, never left Herzl’s thinking; racial degeneration was intimately tied up with an idea of debased masculinity. Please note, the problem wasn’t just in his mind: Herzl was operating in a culture that often treated Jewish men as less than men, both in polite society (Jews are just good with their minds, Jews aren’t worthy of being soldiers) to more primal, shocking anti-Semitism (a belief that Jewish men menstruated). Clearly, the humiliation of Jewish men was real and needed to be addressed.
And yet has this project yielded only renewed self-esteem?
Unfortunately, I believe one can hear the language of Herzlian self-hatred/manly redemption in many of Israel’s worst actions and in Zionists’ defense of them. (Do you remember during the Gaza War the principle “the boss has gone mad?”)
I hear it in Zionists’ historical hostility/erasure of the mamaloshen – the “feminine” Yiddish language, in the political power of military leaders and veterans in Israel, even in the ur-moment of the ur-text of American Zionism: when Sal Mineo in Exodus, in order to join the Jewish underground in pre-state Palestine, finally confesses what happened to him in the Camps – “they used me as a woman!” – before being given a rifle and allowed to fight.
I’m all for men feeling good about themselves as men. But Jews do seem to act differently in Israel, jazzed on the power of having guns and not being a minority for once. Women too: the woman who called the Prime Minister “Benjamin Yahoo” in (Max Blumenthal's) “Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem” seems just as hopped on masculine power.
So. Does Herzl’s plea for empowerment and dignity lead necessarily to the disempowerment and humiliation of others? Philosophically no. But in practice, when settling an already populated land, surrounded by neighbors who remember what you did to clear the land… yes, it seems Jewish empowerment has played out as an ugly zero sum game.
Herzl the Success/Herzl the Failure:
Finally, we need to be talking about Herzl because he was so damn successful. He created all the major organs of the Zionist movement: the manifesto “The Jewish State”, the Colonial Bank for settlement of Palestine, the little blue charity boxes for the Jewish National Fund, the Zionist newspaper Die Welt, and the Congress that would become the Israeli Knesset in 1948.
(Ironically, one of the most laudable successes of Zionism – the rebirth of Hebrew as a living language – was not planned or anticipated by Herzl.)
But Herzl was also unsuccessful. He thought Zionism would end Anti-Semitism, that Zionism would allow Jews to overcome their internalized sense of victimhood. Instead, European style Anti-Semitism (i.e. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”) has taken root among large swaths of the 1.5 billion-strong Muslim world where it did not previously exist, and while remembering the Holocaust is essential, for Israelis it is always 1938, we are always on the edge of annihilation, every opponent is always Hitler.
Herzl failed in his belief that there could be an easy resolution to the question of the indigenous Arab majority of Palestine. His inability to see Arabs as a people worthy of respect is a great sin, not easily forgiven, but those who actually formulated Zionism’s Arab policy and carried out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine deserve – in my opinion – more of the blame than the dreamer who in his naïvete assumed something fair could be worked out… who died only a few years into planning for where the Jewish state should be, and who was willing to go to Uganda, or anywhere, where Jews could be safe.
Lastly, on a personal note, I resent Herzl’s casual disregard for Diaspora achievement, as though Emma Goldman, Sigmund Freud, George Gershwin, I could go on of course, were somehow unfortunate side effects of “exile” rather than the main game, the beauty and measure of Jewish achievement. If one were to test Herzl’s belief that a Jewish State would unleash Jewish creativity against the actual intellectual and cultural history of Israeli vs. American Jews over the past 61 years… I think Herzl would be judged wrong on that too.
Okay, I’ve written a lot without yet getting to the reason my play has not been done, which has less to do with Herzl than it does with my portrait of Ariel Sharon – with the audacity of portraying a contemporary figure in a less than flattering light.
My play asks whether Sharon is the ultimate strong man to arise from Herzl’s desire for manly strength, for a new kind of Jew. I believe Herzl’s Zionism – whether he consciously articulated it or not – needed men comfortable with the kind of policies Sharon championed.
I wonder if you agree, since you are a fan of Herzl’s. Do you think Israeli militarism is grounded somehow in Herzl’s thinking? Or can you imagine a different road for Herzl’s Zionism in Palestine than what actually happened?
Weiss: Good questions. I'll respond by email to Zellnik, and then publish that dialogue. (One quick point, off topic. Isn't it astonishing that Zellnik is citing Blumenthal's video, Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem, and you can't view it online? Truly one of the most important statements about Israel today, and who Israel is calling to, and it's been depublished.)
