Amazing Jewish Heroes Down Through The Ages by David Richard Goldberg, © 2018; Gefen Publishing, ISBN 9789652-298812; 187 pages including afterword and sources.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – You might call this book a Jewish hagiography, one which may be interesting for Young Adults to read but really not suitable for quotation in research papers.
On the cover one sees in the top row Theodor Herzl, Golda Meir, and Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Below them are Menachem Begin, David Ben-Gurion, and the biblical Queen Esther. Other famous Jews whose life stories are sketched by author David R. Goldberg are Rabbi Akiva; Haym Salomon, Uriah Phillips Levy, Felix Zandman, and Simon Wiesenthal.
Each of these stories relies on secondary sources; that is, the author essentially has rewritten or abridged the work of other authors. Think of the party game of “telephone” where one person whispers a secret in the ear of another, who repeats the secret somewhat to the next person, and so on around the circle. Invariably, the last person to hear the message says aloud something different than what the first person said. To be taken seriously by historians, research papers need to utilize primary sources, be they recorded interviews with the subject, memoirs, correspondence, or other first-person accounts. The fewer intermediate story-tellers, the better.
That’s not to say that this book doesn’t have its value for history lovers. Think of it as a tip sheet. You read something about the life of one of these luminaries, and you think, “hmmm, that’s interesting. Maybe I will check into this further.” Clearly, too, biographies can be inspirational for young adults. If you like, or hate, the articles and books that I have written about traveling from place to place, you can either credit or blame Ernie Pyle, whose collection of travel columns fascinated me as a youth.
I found myself jotting down a few factoids from the book about each of the profiled subjects. They are the type of things I might want to check out for myself.
For example, Rabbi Akiva’s rich father-in-law was so angered by the marriage, he banished both Akiva, then a shepherd, and is daughter; later, when Akiva was a revered scholar the father abjectly apologized. Queen Esther, according to this book, kept her Jewishness secret, but her Jewish maids supplied her with kosher food.
Haym Solomon’s ability to speak German came in handy during America’s Revolutionary War; he helped persuade Hessian mercenaries to desert the British and accept a bounty from the Pennsylvania colony. Uriah Phillips Levy, like his grandfather Jonas Phillips, was always an admirer of Thomas Jefferson. He paid for sculptor Pierre-Jean David d’Angers to make a statue of Jefferson, and later he purchased Monticello, Jefferson’s estate, so that he could restore it.
Industrialist Felix Zandman, famous as the head of Vishay Intertechnology electronics company, spent 17 months in a hole 5 feet wide, 5 ½ feet long, and 4 feet deep hiding from the Nazis with three other people, and sometimes four. Simon Wiesenthal, the great Nazi hunter, developed as a source a former Nazi SS man, whose own father was Jewish. That source helped Wiesenthal located Kurt Wiese, who ordered the murders of more than 200 people, including 80 Jewish children in Grodno and Bialystok.
Theodor Herzl was under the impression that once Jews had a state of their own, anti-Semitism would be a scourge of the past. While he was wrong, it doesn’t diminish his accomplishment of being the first well-known advocate of Zionism. Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote from Rome for Russian newspapers under the pseudonym “Altalena.” That was later the name of the Irgun ship that was shelled by the Haganah.
David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir separately were so wedded to the Zionist cause and later the Israeli state that their respective marriages were tattered and their children felt abandoned. Menachem Begin, on the other hand, while equally devoted to the Zionist cause, was able to maintain close, loving relations with his wife Alisa until the end.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com
I’d nominate the four Leonards: Bernstein, Nimoy, Cohen, and Bruce.