Summary
Avukah (Torch), as Lahav presents it: the Zionist student organisation founded in 1925 by Max Rhoade and Joseph Shubow after a Palestinian delegation’s tour “to arouse interest among our youth in Zionism”, at a time when campus Jewish organisations were anemic and the Intercollegiate Zionist Association practically defunct, which became the focus of Simon Agranat’s social and political life at the University of Chicago (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 540-575).
Details
- Its Chicago chapter was volunteered by the Palestinian student Yitzhak Chizik, a hard-core Labor Zionist whose sister Sarah had died at Tel Hai; Agranat became chapter chairman, Arthur Goldberg a member and his successor as chairman (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 555-585).
- Through Chizik, Agranat encountered Labor Zionism’s “conquest of labor” and the tension with his father’s liberal Zionism (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 570-590).
- Agranat’s 1927 nine-page Chicago report proposed a transatlantic partnership aiding Tel Aviv high-school graduates to form a kibbutz — “to establish between ourselves and Palestine a living liaison” — departing from Avukah’s official Hebrew University focus; national president Max Rhoade opposed its fundraising as poisonous to cultural endeavour, and at the July 1928 Pittsburgh convention Chaim Arlosoroff, who had promised support, proposed another project instead (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 580-606).
- Agranat’s 1930 eulogy for Yitzhak’s brother Ephraim Chizik, “A Modern Maccabean”, was published in the Avukah Annual 5 (1930) (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 616-650).
Related pages
Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, Simon Agranat, Labor Zionism, Hebrew University