When many people hear the words “Jewish Agency,” what first comes to mind are the emissaries whom Israel sends to Jewish communities abroad. Those Israelis who attend summer camps in the United States and elsewhere. Or “Shin Shinim,” who venture across the world, bringing Israeli content and an Israeli presence to synagogues, JCC’s, communities and more.
Given that the Jewish Agency was only created in 1929 (the Zionist movement had been aloft for a number of decades by that point), we might assume that prior to that, there were no such emissaries. But, it turns out, there were.
Yet if the Jewish Agency didn’t send them, who did? Who got to go? Who decided? Who went, and what did they do on these journeys? Did they influence American Jews, or vice versa? Would Louis Brandeis have been a Zionist without these emissaries? Would David Ben-Gurion have become Prime Minister had he not been one?
In the these challenging days, it warms the heart to remember that era of cascading Zionist optimism, to encounter the Zionist greats before they were the greats. Today, with veteran educator Dani Steiner as our guide, we take a journey to the very roots of everything Israel ultimately became—and because we can all use the “lift,” we’re making this conversation available to all our readers.
Dani is a veteran Israeli educator who has also done extensive research on the very early Israeli “shlichim” (emissaries) to the United States.
Steiner grew up in Haifa and served as an infantry combat officer and commander in First Lebanon War, and then in the First and Second Intifadas.
He earned his BA in Sociology from the University of Haifa, and an MA in Anthropology from Hebrew University in Jerusalem. For most of his career he served as a senior administrator or Head of School at cutting edge schools both in Israel and the US. Currently he is the director of a new cultural center in Haifa.
Three years ago, Steiner decided to devote time to historical research at the department of Israel History at Haifa University. He is currently completing his second MA there, and will soon begin doctoral work to pursue this research.
Steiner has of late balanced all his work and research with active reserve service in the IDF, and since October 7, has served more than 150 days as a lieutenant colonel at the Central Command Headquarters. He is married with 4 children and lives in Haifa.
The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read.
One of the truly wonderful things about living in Israel, and I think especially in Jerusalem, and particularly in our part of Jerusalem, is that you end up having conversations and end up meeting people who have fascinating light to shine on the story of this country, the story of Zionism, the history of the state. You didn't even know these people were doing the work that they're doing. You knew nothing about the research that they had done. Our guest today, Danny Steiner, is a venerable Israeli educator who has led a number of Israeli schools, very busy these days because he's also a very senior member of the Reserves and is thus very involved in the war effort, and has also been a Shaliyah to a variety of places in the United States, including Providence and Baltimore, which is a city that he and I now have in common.
Danny and I were introduced by a mutual friend, and when we got to know each other, he told me that he had been doing research about the early Shlechim that went from Palestine to the United States. Now, we all know that the Jewish agency sends Shlechim. There are Shin-Shinim who live in communities for a year or two. There are lots of Shlechim emissaries who go to Jewish summer camps in America. There are Shlechim who go to be assigned to a federation, for example, for a number of years. But we've always assumed, at least I've always assumed, that these Shlechim were a project of the Jewish agency. The Jewish agency gets formed, and then over the course of time, it decides to send people America, among other places. But it turns out that that's really not at all the case, that there were Schlechim going to America in all different kinds of ways long before there was a Jewish agency. And as we're going to hear from Danny Steiner, these Schlechim had an enormous impact, not only on America, but actually on Israel. We're going to hear that there was a Shaliyah who had an enormous impact on Louis Brandeis.
We have a sense that David Ben Gurion came of political age in Palestine. But Danny Steiner is going to suggest to us that no, actually, David Ben Gurion really became the person that we know him as in America when he was a Shaliyah. We know that Golden Mayor went back for three years and had a hugely successful experience as a Shlecha, which set her up later on for her political life. We're also going to hear about Shlechim, who went to America, looked around, and actually, the Tocquevillesque, wrote down their impressions and sent them back. So I'm really delighted to invite Danny Steiner to share with us some of his research. Danny, I want to thank you for taking time out at such a busy time in your life. But this is really fascinating story of early Israel, and especially in these days when life is really not so easy here. I think it's heartwarming to hear a little bit about how the country that we now call home got started in this particular light. So, thanks for being here.
Thank you so much for inviting me. I have to be careful here because I'm not a native English speaker, and my wife is an English teacher, and I'm sure she's going to listen to this, so I really have to be careful. But feel free to correct me and add if I forget some of my English.
I'm born and raised in Israel. My parents are Swiss. They came here in the mid '60s. So, I always had this connection with the Diaspora, with Jewish people in the diaspora. I grew up in a conservative school in Haifa, which is pretty rare. And the age of 17 was the first time I went in a student exchange program to America. And since then, I went for many times. During my career as a head of school, I spent a few years in Providence, Rhode Island, and I was the head of school there. It was a Schechter school, and it became a community school. And then, as you said before, I was a shaliach in Baltimore. And this phenomenon really was very interesting for me, not just to be a shaliach, but also to research it.
So, I always had this dream to go back to university. When the kids started to leave the house and I had more time, then I went back to the university, Haifa University, and I did an additional master's degree in Jewish peoplehood. This research is a product of the study in Haifa University. University. Professor Gur Alroey, who just recently became the President of the University, was my guide. Elan Ezrachi was also part of this research. Hopefully it will go on to a PhD in the upcoming years if the situation will let me go back to research. So that's a little bit about myself.
So, tell us about Shluchim in the early part of the 20th century or how this whole thing gets started, and then we'll go into some of the examples that you wanted to share with us.
I actually want to start with the early phenomenon. It is called Shadarim, or or Shluchim.
When you say Shadarim, what do you actually mean by that? It's an abbreviation, right? What are the Shadarim?
Right. Shadar means shulchei d’rabanan, which means was sent by the rabbis, was sent by the congregations, was sent by the communities. So, throughout the years, throughout the 2,000 years that we were in the gola [Diaspora]. There were Jews in Israel all the time in the four holy cities, Tiberias, and Tzfat, and Jerusalem, and Hebron. And they sent rabbis to communities and congregations all over the world to raise money. That was the way how the Jews lived in Israel, what we called kaspei hahaluka [monies that were collected outside of Israel, mostly in Europe, but not exclusively, and then sent back to the old Yishuv]. And their stories are fascinating.
So, when I decided to really research the beginning of the phenomena of shlichut, I went back to look at the history. I think part of the reason is because I'm also doing a comparison, which maybe towards the end of the conversation, we'll talk about the comparison between these rabbis that went in the 17th, and 15th, and 16th century all over Europe, and some other places in the world, some of the exotic places in the world, and to our modern phenomena of shlichim. So, the first thing was, I took a very huge book. It looks a little bit like a Bible by a guy named Avram Ya’ari, who really researched every one of these shlichim.
How many were there?
About 800.
From when to when?
Between, I would say, the year, almost the destruction of Second Temple. Until the 19th century.
So, 800 over 1,900 years.
Yeah. And I wondered if there were some shadarim that came to America. And I discovered 18 of them. 18 people, some of them, even before the establishment of the United States, came to America.
Before 1776?
Yes. So, the name of the first guy was Moshe Malky. He came to the United States in 1759. And he got to Newport and to New York. And he's called by Ya’ari, the first shaliach that came to the new world. That's how he calls it.
1759?
Yeah.
Wow.
So, I started my research. And by the way, regarding the materials, I would say two things. My two primary materials were private letters that the shlichim wrote to their families in Israel.
That were saved where?
In archives. So, Israel is a paradise of archives. This is one thing that I discovered. A lot of kibbutzim have private archives. There's a National Archive, the Zionist Archive. So, for example, I discovered in the National Archive, 120 letters that Ben Zvi, that was the second President of Israel, wrote to his wife when he was a shaliach. He was a shaliach twice, once with Ben-Gurion, which we're going to talk about in a minute, the second time in the '20s. And he is going from place to place, and he is sharing the experience of talking to the people, of discovering America to his wife. By the way, later, his wife also went and left him with two kids here. And she was an amazing shaliach. She was one of the best shekels. She raised tons of money.
She was a very impressive woman in every way.
Right. Very charismatic. Her shlichut was very interesting. And the second source was Jewish American newspapers. In this time, most of the newspapers are in Yiddish, and I discovered I actually know Yiddish. It's very funny. I started to read, and I discovered I understand.
Well, you probably know some German from your Swiss background.
Yes, exactly. I know Swiss German, and I know Hebrew. At least for the newspaper stuff, the newspaper stuff was enough. There's also an amazing online archive that is a collaboration of Tel Aviv University and the State Archive with all the Jewish newspapers that ever exist. You write the name. If you know how to spell it in Yiddish, you write the name, you get all the stuff, all the items, all the newspaper items ever written about this person. And that's amazing. It really helped me a lot.
So, basically, I divided my research into three parts. The first part is the first shlichim. They were all private initiatives. Nobody sent them. So, the first shlichah is actually a woman. Nobody knows her name. Her name is Shoshana Buchmil. She went to the United States, 1909, to fundraise.
How old a woman at that time?
She was in her mid-30s.
Married, not married?
She was married. They had no kids. They tried to live in Tel Aviv, but they were very adventurous, both of them. So separately, he went to a shlichut to raise money in Eastern Europe, and she went to America. Both of them had a PhD. They were very, very intelligent, charismatic people, and they did fundraising.
Before you and I went on and started recording, and we were chatting, you mentioned to me this fascinating story about Aaron Aaronsohn. The Aaronsohn family was, of course, a very, very colorful family from Zichron Yaakov. There's actually still a museum about the Aaronsohn family in Zichron Yaakov. The best-known member of the family is Sarah Aaronsohn, who spied against the Turks for the British. She was eventually captured and tortured and committed suicide. A very colorful personality.
Her brother, Aaron Aaronsohn, is a little bit less well known, although he's pretty famous, too. He's an example of somebody who actually went to America, as I think you explained to me, not really as a shaliach, so to speak. He had a more professional agenda. But once he was there, he had a huge impact on Zionism because he met Louis Brandeis. Tell us a little bit about that.
Aaron Aaronsohn is an amazing person. He started here an underground that fight the Turks. He was a very intelligent guy. He was very knowledgeable, but above and beyond, he was a scientist. He was an agronomist, and he had some very interesting scientific findings.
I think they developed a kind of wheat?
He found a specific wheat here in Palestine. But the main thing he did, as an agronomist, he identified most of the plants here in this area and created this catalog, this amazing catalog with drawings and very systematic. He built a tachanat nisionot.
A research station.
Yeah, a research station in Atlit. So, he was invited by some research people in America, some professors in them actually in the West Coast. And from the beginning, he writes that he's going to America not for the scientific reason, but to spread the news about Zionism. So, it's sort of an undercover shaliach. And people are amazed by him as a scientist, but he always talks again and again and again, mostly to non-Jews, about what's going on in Palestine, about the agriculture here, about the pioneers here, about the Jews coming back to the land of Israel. During these journeys, he meets Brandeis. Louis Brandeis. He meets Louis Brandeis. Louis Brandeis writes about him in his diary about Aaronsohn. He writes, Aaronsohn is a Romanian Jew who, at the age of five, immigrated to Palestine with his father, who is now a farmer there. The talks about the talk that Aaronsohn gave, was the most thrillingly interesting I have ever heard, showing the possibilities of scientific agriculture….” So, he is amazed by Aaronsohn.
Brandeis is doing what in his life at this point?
He's already, I think, a pretty famous lawyer. I don't think he's a judge yet, but I'm not sure. We're talking about 1912. So, in a few letters, and then there's another letter from 1913, he writes about how impressive this Aaronsohn is. Aaronsohn went to the United States in these years four times. And he didn't raise a lot of money. But it definitely made a huge presence of Palestine in America.
And is it fair to say that he made Brandeis into a Zionist? Or is that putting it too strongly?
I think he definitely plant the seeds there. He plant the seeds. When I read about Brandeis, I think there's a whole host of reasons why Brandeis became so Zionistic, and it was so important for him. But meeting Aaronsohn for a few times, I think it planned the seeds and made him open his eyes about what's going on in Palestine. There were additional few shlichim that came before WWI. Most of them are not famous. Another famous guy was Shatz that raised money for Bezalel.
That's the guy who has the street name. Bezalel Shatz.
Yeah. Bezalel Shatz, he came from Israel with a whole display of things. I have no idea how he took it with him, but he went from city to city and made a huge display of things they make in Bezalel. And by that, he raised money.
People should just know that Bezalel is Israel's most preeminent art school.
Right. So that was the first part. Again, as I said, private initiatives, but these leaders came to America for a few months and raised money, basically, for their private initiative. The second part is World War I. World War I is very interesting because the shlichim that came to America, they didn't plan to get there. The Turks expelled all the leadership or the Zionist leadership in Israel at the beginning of World War I. And some of them came to America. The most famous one, of course, is Ben-Gurion.
There's a lot of theories why Ben Gurion came to America. There are maybe six or seven biographies about Ben Gurion, and each one of them has a different theory. My theory is he was very curious about America. It was very curious. He heard a lot about it. He wanted to learn. He was open to American ideas. And you see while being there for four or five years, how much he took from the American culture to his leadership. He writes in his diary that America is interesting. I want to go there. And then, of course, there was a committee that decided to send him to America, et cetera, et cetera. But basically, I think that personally, he was interested in America.
How old is he when he went?
He was in his late 20s. He was a bachelor.
He met Paula in America, right?
Right. He went with a good friend, Ben Tzvi. They were comrades, they were colleagues. They were good friends, at least when they came to America. It was nice that they had this camaraderie when they got there. They got to America, they had no idea, they didn't know English. They didn't know anyone. They landed on the shore of America.
Who sent them or they also went by themselves?
They sent themselves. So, in the research I read a few times, the saying is, they left Israel as expelled Zionists, and they arrived in America as shlichim. Because from day one, their mission was to do propaganda, to sell Palestine in many ways.
So, the first chapter of Ben Gurion in America was try to create a battalion of Jews that will arrive in Israel and be sort of halutzim (pioneers)/soldiers. And he went from town to town. He was trying to recruit young youngsters. He was signing them a contract. Then the minute he's going to call them, they have to immediately go on a ship and travel to Israel. It was a failure.
It was obviously going to be a failure. You can only do that project. You know nothing about American culture.
Right. Which he didn't know. He didn't know. He had no English. People didn't like the way he talked. People wrote back to the party in New York, the organizers, to the organizers in New York, “who's this guy? Why are you bringing him to me? To us, he's not interested. He's boring. He doesn't know how to talk”. And Ben-Gurion himself didn't like it. It was very tiring for him. He became sick. After a few stops, he became sick. He stayed in one place for two or three weeks. He didn't do his job. Ben Tzvi was good. Ben Tzvi was much better than he was.
Did their friendship survive that, Ben Tzvi being better than Ben-Gurion?
Ben-Gurion envied Ben Tzvi, but at this stage, they were good friends. They worked separately. Each of them went to separate towns. And that's, by the way, part of all the shlichim. Even when they went as a mishlachat, as a group of shlichim from here, at the '20s, they were very individual. They worked individually. Each one of them had a different plan in America. They got back to the city. By the way, it's fascinating to read each one of these shlichim spend time in New York. Sometimes a few weeks, sometimes even more. It's a culture shock.
Even today, I think I remember myself in the age of 17, the first time in New York, and we're talking about the '80s. So, imagine yourself, this shlichim in the '20s. There was nothing in Palestine. But New York was a modern city. It was a huge city. I mean, there were ads and trains and electricity. The culture shock is amazing. It's very funny to read.
You mentioned to me that Ben-Gurion, when he was in the States, did a variety of projects, some of them classical shaliach projects. But there was also these Yizkor books, which actually has a hugely transformative impact on his life. I actually ask about it now because we're actually seeing a lot of Yizkor books produced now in 2024, about October 7th. But what we're seeing now about October 7th actually goes back a very, very long time in Jewish history, this tradition of the Yizkor book. So, tell us a little bit about these Yizkor books and how Ben Gurion gets involved in this, and how Yizkor books are part of Ben-Gurion becoming the person that he eventually becomes.
Then they decided to shift their shlichut. They did something that I think is echoing today to the war. There was a book named Yizkor, which was a book that was published in 1910 or 1911 here in Palestine, a book that memorized the heroine stories of the halutzim that died on the guard of the Yishuv, with the names, with the small drawings of their profile, and with the story, how they were killed or how they were murdered. And they decided to translate the book to Yiddish and publicize it in America. The first edition, Ben Tzvi and Ben-Gurion did together. It was a huge success. They sold 5,000 copies. And they made a nice profit.
And then Ben-Gurion decided to do a second edition by himself. And it was a huge fight between him and Ben Tzvi. Ben Tzvi went to Washington. He wanted to write a book. Ben-Gurion stayed in New York and published a second edition that was basically his edition. And this edition really made him famous in New York and made him a speaker. And when he went from time to time to sell the book, he was a different Ben-Gurion. He was a salesperson. He was charismatic. Maybe it was because it was already his third year in America, and he got the spirit. But it was a completely different Ben-Gurion. And a lot of the research has said that that's the time when Ben-Gurion started to become the leader that he was later. He was sharp, he was competitive, he knew exactly what he wanted to do, and he took no prisoners. He didn't care about other people anymore. He cared about what he thought is the right thing to do.
And then later, the friendship with Ben Tzvi was important to him. So, we tried to start a friendship again, and they decided to write a whole book about the Eretz Israel and Palestine. And that's the time where he met Paula. Paula helped him to write a book. And that's a very funny story about Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion writes tons and tons and tons of articles and diaries. You can read Ben-Gurion for the rest of your life, and you never end. He writes one line about his marriage. “In the morning, we went to the City Hall, and I got married to Paula”. That's it. That's the only sentence he writes.
That's actually fascinating. I never thought about that before. They didn't have a Jewish wedding ever after?
I think that later a rabbi signed the papers.
That's fascinating.
But that's how he got married.
Very interesting. Wow. We have Ben Gurion who goes to America and somehow another gets transformed himself. And so, if Brandeis becomes the great leader of American Zionism for a while, there's going to be a power struggle. He's going to lose that power struggle and all that. Right. But okay. And then Ben Gurion goes to America, and he gets the skills and the personality and the drive to become the leader of Zionism in Palestine. And then, of course, in Israel afterwards. So, these, these having been sent to America, they are hugely transformative of Americans and of some Palestine/Israelis.
I totally agree with you. In the 20s, the shlichut is becoming more formal. The Histadrut, which is the first organization, formal organization, was established in Israel in the 1920s.
Still Israel's major labor union people should know.
Still, right. So, they are sending groups of shlichim to America to fundraise. I mean, all the big endeavors in Israel, all the big projects, kupat holim (HMOs) hospitals, roads, ports. These project starts in the '20s, and they need huge money. So, they send people to America to raise money. And in this time, between 1920 and 1930, a lot of the people that became later the first row, we say in Hebrew, hashura harishona, of the leadership of Israel went to America.
So, for example, the first group of shlichim is Berl Katznelson, who's not so well known because he wasn't a political leader, but he was maybe the most important influential philosopher of this time, of the Union Party, and a good friend of Ben-Gurion.
Some say his closest friend.
Some say his closest friend. So, he went in the first mission together with a very famous lady named Manya Shochat, with another guy who's not so famous, name is Yosef Baratz, who was the founder of Kibbutz Deganya. So that was the first mission 1921. I researched about six missions, all of them famous people, Menahem Sheinkin, Dov Hoz, Golda Meir, that was actually American but went back to America as a shlicha.
She was very successful, right?
She was very successful. At her second shlichut, she was there for three years. Then actually, she was one of the people that established the Women Zionist Group that later on became Na’amat. Ben Tzvi that went a few times, Ben Tzvi’s wife that went a few times. So, there's a whole host of really very famous Israeli figures that went to America and made a lot of changes.
So, one guy that I want to talk about maybe for a few minutes is Arlosoroff. Arlosoroff is a little bit a different character because He already had a PhD in his mid-20s from Germany. He was a sociologist. He was a very articulate speaker. And he made a deal with the leadership. He said, I'm willing to go. I don't like to raise money. I actually hate to raise money, but I'm willing to do it in one condition that you will give me another additional year in America that you will fund. And I want to research American Jewry. And he got permission to do it. And he was the first guy that actually had a flat in New York with his second wife and two kids. And he actually lived there for a pretty long time.
And he went from town to town, and he really observed American Judaism. And he wrote a very interesting, fascinating document called “Letters from America”. I'm not sure there's a translation to English. I think he wrote it in German. He wrote everything in German. But there's, of course, a translation to Hebrew. And his observations are very interesting.
So, for example, he talks about assimilation. He's very, very afraid from the assimilation. He says the second generation of the immigration from Eastern Europe to America They already are Americans in his eyes.
He's saying this in 1929?
'27, yeah.
I know that you also uncovered some fascinating letters by Haim Arlosoroff. Now, Arlosoroff is really one of the most colorful personalities in the pre-state Zionist era, as many people may know, in negotiating a deal with the Nazis to try to do what was called the Transfer Agreement, to allow German Jews to escape and to have some of their belongings come with them, a whole very complicated negotiation that he had with the Nazis, which some of the Jews in the Yishuv were opposed to, and that may be the reason that he was assassinated on the beach of Tel Aviv, though to this day, we don't actually know who killed him.
But he was a dealmaker and a very, very colorful person. He did this deal Germany in large measure because his contact there was a young woman named Magda, who eventually became Magda Goebbels. He had an affair with her before she was married to the Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels. It's a crazy life and a crazy story, but in addition to everything else, he also wrote fascinating things about America, as a shaliach. Instead of telling the Americans about Palestine, he ended up telling himself and then others about what he discovered in America. Tell us something about that.
Yes. There are 12 letters. Very observational. He admires American Jewry on one hand, how successful they are, how good businessmen they are, how they managed to become so fast part of American society. But on the other hand, he really is critical about them, about assimilation. He talks about... one very funny thing is that all of them, most of them were socialist. They were what we call in Hebrew, hiluni, they were secular. But they're looking at the Reform and Conservative Jews with a lot of criticism. It's very strange to them. They say, look, this is so different than what I know from beit Abba, from the house of my parents. Such a different Judaism and very strange.
In that regard, nothing has changed. Right. I mean, most Israelis who do not have any interaction with the religious world, they still know what they think the religious world should look like. And it's Orthodox. They don't think that Reform or Conservative, even though they don't do anything in themselves, doesn't feel authentic to them. So, it's interesting. We're a century later, really almost a century to the day, and that dynamic hasn't really changed all that much. Right.
It was fascinating to me to read in these letters, this way of thinking. It's very similar to what's going on today. I completely agree with you.
So, throughout the work, part of the work, I felt gave me a very interesting way of looking at the beginning of the Zionist movement and at the beginning of the Yishuv and the narrative that that Israelis were talking about themselves, how they saw themselves. For example, how important it was for them to say that we're productive, that we're not as the Jewish merchants in Europe, that we're doing agriculture, that we're fighters.
The new Jew.
The new Jew, yeah. But on the other hand, of course, oversimplify it. And coming to America, transformed a little bit how they talked. So, there's a very famous, very funny story. So, for example, Dizengoff, who was the mayor of Tel Aviv, had for a few months, he lost an election, and a guy named David Bloch replaced him for a few months. And then Dizengoff came back, and David Bloch went to a shlichut. And when he comes to America, he's not the mayor of Tel Aviv anymore, but he represents himself. In all the newspaper, you read, the mayor of Tel Aviv comes to Chicago, comes to I don't know where. So, he forgot that he's not the mayor anymore. So, they really sold themselves. But on the other hand, there’s other cute stories. For example, there's a shaliach named Hannah Chizik, the Chizik family, very famous family. Her sister was murdered with Trumpeldor in Tel Hai, Sarah Chizik.
So, Hannah Chizik she comes to New York as a shlicha at the end of the '20s, and she gets to Los Angeles. She sees in Los Angeles a gala evening, fundraising evening, with the number one Jewish celeb in those times, Einstein.
Oh, wow. Okay.
Albert Einstein. She wants to go, but it costs $6. So, she is not sure she has the money. They were extremely poor. They were driving on trains for 12 hours with no food. They were poor. A day before the event, someone is calling her and tells her, I want you, the shlicha from Eretz Yisrael, to present Einstein. She tells the story how she met him and shakes his hand and how he tells her how impressive she is and how important the work they do in Israel is. And she tells Einstein, you have to do more for Palestine. So, these stories, here and there, really are very exciting because you see these Israelis. There are Israelis that are coming to the United States and finding the way how to become meaningful and how to tell the Israeli and Palestine story to Americans.
It's really fascinating because as I said at the outset, I certainly, before you and I chatted, I had never thought about the possibility that there were shlichim before the Jewish Agency started to send people, and then summer camps, and then shinshinim [year of service after high school], and I never thought about it. And the fact that so many people did it is amazing. The fact that they had such impressions, they left impressions on people like Brandeis in America, left impressions on people like Ben- Gurion and Arlosoroff. It just shows you about the dual direction, the bi-directional cultural influence. They're bringing a message from Palestine.
But let's maybe wrap up by saying, we're going to Israel is going through a rough time right now, to put it very mildly. And obviously, the war is part of it. And for some people, the government is part of it. And for some people, what happened last year with the judicial reform is part of it. But a lot of people are talking about the atomization of Israeli society, that it was once a very socialist collective. There was a sense of the larger hole. And that's been really willowed down for quite some time. And people see that also as American influence. In other words, the individualist of the Western world gradually seeped into Israel through television through radio. I mean, Ben Gurion didn't want there to be television in Israel. He really wanted to keep all of that out. He obviously lost that battle.
But it's really a fascinating piece of a much larger story, the relationship between Israel and America, the relationship between Israelis and American Jews, the ways in which Israelis shaped Americans thinking about the world, the ways in which Americans shaped Israelis thinking about the world. We know a lot about that now and how it keeps going on, but we don't really know how early the origins are. And it's really just It's really a fascinating story. I really want to read these letters from Arlosoroff, that letters or whatever to himself, obviously. But it would be fascinating to read what he said about a century ago, what he saw about America, and then to compare how things played out. So maybe I'll get those from you sometime. This is fascinating to me. For people who love Jewish history, for people who are fascinated about the early roots of Israel and Zionism, this is really just an incredible treasure trove of insights.
So, thank you. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for teaching us. And I'm sure you're going to do the doctorate. Things will calm down, and you'll do the doctorate, and then there'll be a book, and we'll all read the book. And I look forward to that very, very much.
Thank you very much, Daniel.
Music credits: Medieval poem by Rabbi Shlomo Ibn Gvirol. Melody and performance by Shaked Jehuda and Eyal Gesundheit. Production by Eyal Gesundheit. To view a video of their performance, see this YouTube:
"Israel" was sending "shelichim" to America before there was an Israel. Who knew?