FALSE MESSIAHS

Courtesy of Barnett R. Rubin

THIS PICTURE of two teenage Zionists was taken in 1906 in Kamenetz-Podolsk, Ukraine, in what was then the Russian empire. On the right is my wife Susan Blum’s paternal grandmother, Rose Resnick. On the left is a friend, name unknown, holding a Yiddish publication entitled Der Nayer Veg, or the New Way—the organ of the central committee of the Zionist Socialist Workers Party, founded in Odesa in 1905. It published twenty-five issues between May 1906 and January 1907, when it was closed by the Czarist authorities.

In the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack in Israel, debates about Zionism and colonialism have exploded everywhere, from university campuses to the UN General Assembly. These girls, at least, were not settler colonialists; their Zionism was a response to the intensified persecution of the Jews in late nineteenth-century Europe. At the time about half of the world’s Jewish population lived under the rule of Russian Czars, and they were subjected to bloody pogroms. Rose recalled one in which the pogromists cut off the hands of a Jewish baker and tossed them in his oven so he could never again knead bread. My wife’s maternal grandmother, Pauline Unger, recalled the Odesa pogrom of 1905, the year before this photo was taken, when her neighbors saved her family’s lives by meeting the pogromists outside the building with a cross and swearing there were no Jews inside.