Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky

Secularism and Its Discontents

In an essay first published December 17, 2010, Yehudah Mirsky examines a defense of Jewish secularism and finds it—and Jewish secularism itself—wanting.

Menachem Begin: A New Life

Ensuring that another Holocaust would never take place was Menachem Begin's paramount concern, even when he was Prime Minister of Israel, pursuing Yasir Arafat in his Beirut bunker.

The Mad Zionist

British Major-General Orde Wingate, who fought in theaters from Palestine to Burma, was a military genius.  He was also a Zionist's Zionist.  A new Wingate biography tries to explain why.

The Peacemaker

About Menachem Begin the thing that I remember most was the way he talked.  Begin wouldn’t say that he was born on the eve of the First World War; he’d say, as he did when a group of us from the Wall Street Journal interviewed him in 1981, that he was born “into” World War I.  

The “Married to another Man” Story

In the introduction to his popular and influential history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, The Iron Wall, Oxford professor Avi Shlaim tells this story: "The publication of [Herzl's] The Jewish State evoked various reactions in the Jewish com­munity, some strongly favorable, some hostile, and some skeptical . . ."

The Lone Wolf

The 70th yahrzeit of Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940) was marked on July 11, at Mount Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem, by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres. There was nary a mention of it in the Israeli media—an extraordinary omission given that Jabotinsky was not only a founder of the Haganah and the supreme commander of the Irgun but also a towering Zionist theoretician and leader.