Henrietta Szold: Hadassah and the Zionist Dream (Jewish Lives)
“this all-too-human woman kept looking to a better future not just for Jews, but for all humanity. Perhaps, then, Szold’s story is a tzaddik’s tale for all of us in perilous times.”
Jewish legends recount that in every generation there are 36 tzaddiks, steadfast and virtuous people who by their righteous actions save the world, and yet who remain unknown. It’s hard to read Francine Klagsbrun’s thoughtful but too brief biography of the now nearly forgotten Henrietta Szold and not wonder if she might have been a tzaddik were it not that Szold’s service was finally seen in the last decades of her brave, brilliant, and humble life.
Henrietta Szold: Hadassah and the Zionist Dream deftly shows how one woman’s life was entwined with the creation of two countries, a multicultural United States born in the ashes of the Civil War, and Israel, which rose from the horrors of World War II. Szold, the oldest of eight daughters to an immigrant Hungarian rabbi and his wife, was born a few months before the Civil War began. Within the close-knit Baltimore family, Szold was “the daughter closest to the rabbi, treated by him as he might have treated an eldest son being groomed to follow in his footsteps. Intellectually gifted, serious, and devoted, she received an education from her father equaled by few other women of her time.”
Henrietta mastered German, French, and Hebrew, and translated and edited her father’s work, and later that of other scholars for the Jewish Publications Society. Family obligations, limited finances, and a scarcity of colleges open to women kept her from achieving her dream of a higher education. But nothing could keep her from pursuing a lifelong commitment to education. Szold became a teacher in secular schools and began writing editorials calling for colleges for women, and for a time seemed destined for a quiet life of what was then called spinsterhood.
By the 1880s, the horrific murders, rapes, and other violence against Jews, along with bitter, unending poverty, had forced some two million Russian and East European Jews to seek refuge in the United States. Szold nearly singlehandedly founded Baltimore’s Russian Night School to teach immigrants the language, history, and culture of their new country. The model spread to other cities, and when Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia gave Szold the keys to New York City on her 75th birthday he spoke for thousands, if not millions: “Half a century ago, you initiated that instrument of American democracy, the evening night school for the immigrant.”
As a biographer, Klagsbrun is more concerned with a chronology of Szold’s life than an analysis of her motivations and personality. She embeds Szold’s life in the context of family, Judaism, and early- to mid-20th century Zionism, showing a complex, contradictory woman who was a dutiful daughter and international leader, an attentive older sister and short-tempered colleague, an acclaimed translator, editor, and writer who nonetheless devalued her unique organizational skills as not being truly creative.
Klagsbrun can’t avoid Szold’s confusing and heartbreaking relationship with the scholar Louis Ginsburg, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary where Szold was the first full-time female student, but she doesn’t allow it to eclipse Szold’s accomplishments. Where Szold saw the love of her life, Ginsburg saw a platonic friendship with a colleague. Szold emerged from unrequited love’s depression and humiliation “far more independent and assertive, no longer the self-effacing woman behind the scenes . . . Through profound self-examination and sheer will she had transformed herself.”
From then on Zionism became her lodestar. Szold’s notions of Zionism meant not just the rebirth of a Jewish nation, nor only a refuge from antisemitism, but “a normal human life built around Jewish principles. By reconstituting the Jewish nation . . . Jews could revitalize Judaism and reclaim a life of wholeness and dignity.” She founded Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, which shattered the model of a ladies’ auxiliary that raised charitable funds to support male-led organizations. Klagsbrun persuasively argues that Hadassah was a forerunner of second wave feminism, giving thousands of American women skills in organizational leadership, finance, and strategy. Szold and later Hadassah leaders successfully kept Hadassah an independent, women-led organization focused on the medical, social service, and educational needs of families regardless of religion in pre-state and post-1948 Israel.
A lifelong pacifist, Szold allied herself with efforts to create a binational Jewish and Arab nation believing that Zionism meant “finding a way to live with the Arabs who inhabited the same land.” But she never let her idealism blur her pragmatism. The British assumed control of Palestine after World War I, and Szold was outraged by their refusal to halt Arab violence against Jews, and by their restricting land purchases and Jewish immigration as the Holocaust was beginning to shadow Nazi-controlled Europe, all to try to keep the Arabs from allying with Hitler. By then 73, Szold, who had longed to have children, led the Youth Aliyah, raising funds and badgering the British to allow in thousands of Jewish children fleeing Nazism in Europe and pogroms in the Arab nations.
Szold died in 1945, three years before seeing her dream of Israel become a hard-fought reality. In a testament to her courage and humanity, attending her funeral were Zionist leaders, British government officials, Muslim sheikhs, Christian clergy, and many of the children she had rescued.
A year before her death, Szold had instructed a sculptor making her bust to “make my eyes look to the future.” Writes Klagsbrun, “In every endeavor she headed, whether establishing education and social services in pre-state Israel or reshaping the lives of thousands of children, she set her eyes on the future. In spite of insecurities and self-criticisms, she consistently looked ahead to expand her projects while making sure they were the best they could be in the present.”
Since October 7, 2023, the future has seemed at once close and terrifying for the world’s Jews, and for so many other people in the Middle East. Despite personal heartbreak and international horrors, this all-too-human woman kept looking to a better future not just for Jews, but for all humanity. Perhaps, then, Szold’s story is a tzaddik’s tale for all of us in perilous times.