PIONEER POET
Movers and Shakers The cemetery by Kinneret Village, on the Sea of Galilee, is one of Israel’s loveliest historic sites. The peaks of the Golan Heights twinkle on the horizon, seemingly just beyond reach. Among...
ימימה חובב
Guard Down
Guard Down Unnlike most of Nili’s rank and file, Joseph Lishansky had a foot in both Labor Zionism and the bourgeois homesteaders’ camp. Born in 1890, Lishansky came to the Holy Land with his father...
Return of the Spies
It's Complicated One of the most famous and heroic Jewish contributions to World War I is that of Nili (a Hebrew acronym meaning “Israel’s Glory Does Not Lie”), the spy ring that informed the British...
Zionist with Cello
Music Meets the Fields One foggy morning in 1878, as legend has it, four horseback riders cantered out of Jerusalem. Near the Arab village of Um-Labbes, where they’d hoped to found the first Zionist agricultural...
The Many Faces of Maurycy Gottlieb
Most Famous Picture in Jewish Art? The iconic Jews Praying in the Synagogue on the Day of Atonement is the painting most widely associated with Polish Jewish artist Maurycy Gottlieb (1856–1879). Completed in 1878, it’s...
Marc Chagall – the Surrealist Jew
Herring for Breakfast Standing on the rooftop, suspended between heaven and earth, was Marc Chagall’s childhood perspective on his native Vitebsk: As a boy, I would watch you from our doorstep, childlike. To a child’s...
