The backdrop of Theodor Herzl’s political activism

The Dreyfus Affair in Retrospect:Review Essay Jack Fischel (bio) Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century, by Ruth Harris. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010. 550 pp. $35.00. For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus, by Frederick Brown. New York: Knopf, 2010. 304 pp. $28.95. Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, by Louis Begley. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 249 pp. $16.00. Some hundred years after Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was found guilty in 1894 by a prejudiced military tribunal of passing defense secrets to Germany, the injustice continues to resonate among the tragic events that shaped Jewish history in the twentieth century. It may be argued whether a direct link can be made between the Dreyfus Affair and the deportation by the Vichy government of more than 70,000 French Jews during the Holocaust, but it is unquestionable that the framing of Dreyfus in 1894 unleashed a virulent antisemitism in the most democratic country in Western Europe, a miscarriage of justice that continues to evoke strong emotions in contemporary France. The three books under review concerning the Dreyfus "affair" provide a comprehensive understanding of the political, cultural, and social context that permitted the injustice endured by Dreyfus to occur. In the process, the books reveal a great deal about how antisemitism in France helped shape the course of modern Jewish history in the twentieth century. Indeed, Theodore Herzl, who reported on the trial for his Viennese newspaper, wrote, "If France, the home of the Revolution, was susceptible to the basest anti-Semitism, was that not proof of the need for a Jewish homeland?." The Dreyfus affair most definitely [End Page 119] had much to do with mobilizing the nascent Zionist undertaking into the political movement that subsequently contributed almost fifty years later to the creation of the state of Israel. Too often when we think of the Dreyfus Affair, we tend to think of it along the lines of simply a struggle between antisemitic anti-Dreyfusards, who were determined to railroad Dreyfus to a lifetime of imprisonment on Devil's Island despite evidence that proved his innocence, versus the Dreyfusards, who recognized that he was framed by forces that not only hated Jews but were opposed to the idea of democratic constitutional government as epitomized by the Third French Republic. In her indispensable history of the Dreyfus Affair, Ruth Harris, author of Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age, and a fellow and tutor at Oxford University, in her examination of the trial and the ensuing riots against Jews in France and its colonies, does not underestimate the antisemitic factor in the "affair" but also concludes that the division over Dreyfus's guilt or innocence was far more complex. Harris describes how the trial and its aftermath divided families and friendships, if not the nation itself, including a number of anti-semites, such as Georges Picquart, who placed the rule of law above his predilection to dislike Jews. But the likes of Picquart were few inasmuch as most antisemites were ready to overlook the evidence of Dreyfus's innocence because of their visceral hatred of Jews. Other factors that contributed to the division over the Dreyfus Affair included the reluctance of the military to not dishonor its leadership by admitting its criminality in forging evidence against Dreyfus, the clash between the demands of justice versus national security concerns, a theme which is also addressed in Louis Begley's book, and the oppositional role of the French Catholic Church, which associated France's Jews with the secular-minded Republic and its commitment to the separation of church and state. This, however, is not to underestimate the role of antisemitism in France as an important factor in the Dreyfus Affair. Harris notes that the universalism of the Third French Republic was countered by xenophobic nationalists (not unlike its Völkisch counterparts in Germany) who, like Maurice Barres, saw "France's regions as different 'mothers,' whose variety underpinned the country's divergent vitality. Jews and Protestants, on the other hand, were incarnations of cosmopolitanism, and therefore rootless parasites. They loved 'universalism,' Barres believed, because it masked...

The world that had formed Karl Lueger and Adolf Hitler also nurtured the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl. It was far removed from that world of Jewish orthodoxy enclosed in the Russian ghetto, largely part of Poland until the late eighteenth century, and still home to the vast majority of Europe’s Jews. The Paris of Dreyfus may have been the birthplace of Zionism, but it was the world of muddy shtetls in the East that made Zionism a social and political movement. What brought these two worlds together in Theodor Herzl was the eruption of antisemitism in France during the Dreyfus Affair. It reawakened a Jewish identity in the dapper journalist from Vienna, and it shattered his faith in the ability of European liberalism any longer to guarantee Jews the rights their emancipation had accorded them. That eruption struck a different, sympathetic, chord in French Canada, where Catholic antisemitism was deeply embedded in the culture of Quebec. The violent eruption of Jew-hatred in Russia, meanwhile, launched the greatest migration of Jews in history. It was destined mostly for America, the golden land, where unlimited space and opportunity would lessen the impact of an anti-Jewish tradition that, in Europe, was proving deadly.KeywordsJewish PopulationJewish IdentityWestern HistoryJewish QuestionRitual MurderThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

One of the most iconic stories of Western political Zionism is its founder’s alleged “conversion” to a nationalist project. Just prior to the turn of the twentieth century, Theodor Herzl, a young journalist from central Europe, was canvassing one of the most notorious cases of modern anti-Semitism: the Dreyfus affair. According to the now-legendary narrative, Herzl left Paris shocked by the case we discussed a few chapters hence. A perfectly assimilated individual, very much like himself, was not only singled out as a Jew but also falsely condemned through recourse to a pernicious narrative of bar- barism. The same society that had shed blood to achieve liberty, the same political system that fought for equality, and the same nation that promised universal fraternity was demonstrating its fierce loyalty to a narrative which supposedly undermined each of these humanitarian ideals. Notwithstanding all the service he had provided to the modern European state, Dreyfus, an assimilated Jew par excellence, was accused of having participated in a seditious plot to destroy the most universal of the Western nations.

The paper discusses the fundamental ideas of political Zionism. Many of them were presented in the pamphlet “The Jewish State” (1896) and in a fictionalized form in the utopian novel “The Old New Land” (1902). Their author is the Austrian journalist and writer Theodor Herzl (1860–1904). Some facts and events that influenced the formation of Herzl's views are also named; a number of decisions of the first Zionist congresses are analyzed; the role of Russian Zionists in advancing the movement; the attitude of the government and society in Russia and other countries to Zionism; the perception of Zionism in the ruling and intellectual circles of Israel in our time; the correlation of the ideas of political Zionism with modern internal and external foreign policy and realities of the State of Israel. The article attempts to answer the question: to what extent modern Israel meets the ideals of classical Zionism, to what extent its main provisions were implemented in it.

The founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was convinced that Palestine was a land without people for people without land1 This denial of the identity of the Palestinians by the first exponent of political Zionism is understandable, for political Zionism sought physical possession of the land of the Palestinians without its natives. Far less easy to understand is the UN Security Council resolution of 22 November 1967, 2 which recommended a just settlement of the refugee problem without specifying the national identity of the refugees.

Reviewed by: Kafka und Buber: Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer und seine Satellitenwerke by Hideo Nakazawa Adam J. Toth Hideo Nakazawa, Kafka und Buber: Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer und seine Satellitenwerke. Munich: Iudicium Verlag, 2018. 211 pp. Following up on recent scholarship discussing Franz Kafka's literary relationship to China, Hideo Nakazawa's recent monograph Kafka und Buber: Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer und seine Satellitenwerke makes new waves by bringing Martin Buber into dialogue with the celebrated Austro-Hungarian author on this topic. The objective of this work, according to Nakazawa, is "in eigenen Werken von Kafka die Figuren zu ermitteln, die auf Buber hinzudeuten scheinen […] wie Kafka dort einige Lieblingswörter Bubers verwertete: Verantwortung, Einheit, Blut, entzweien, usw" (5). Nakazawa chooses these words in particular and employs a textual analysis that compares the usages of these words within several of Buber's works, namely Mein Weg zum Chassidismus, Der Jude und sein Judentum, and various articles published by himself and others under his editorship with Der Jude, among other works, and Kafka's "Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer" along with its "satellite-works." These texts include "Eine kaiserliche Botschaft," "Ein altes Blatt" (grouped together with "Beim Bau" in this book as Die Chinesische Mauer), "Die Gruftwächter," "Kastengeist," "Der Nachbar," "Schakale und Araber," "Ein Bericht für eine Akademie," "Die Abweisung," "Zur Frage der Gesetze," and "Die Stadwappen." Without otherwise explicitly stating this, Nakazawa argues broadly that reading Kafka alongside the Viennese cultural Zionist reveals how Kafka's writings on China show us his nuanced understanding and opinion of Jewish nationalism. The first chapter of the book explains the intellectual origins of Buber's cultural Zionism to set up how Buber's positions on Jewish identity inform Kafka's works in the subsequent chapters. Nakazawa illustrates here how Buber's cultural Zionism differs from Theodor Herzl's political Zionism and how Buber's understanding of Zionism is steeped in religious Hasidism. In the second and third chapters, Nakazawa examines "den Mauerbau und die geheimnisvolle Führerschaftim Kontext von Kafkas Auseinandersetzung mit dem Buberschen Zionismus" (70) present in Die Chinesische Mauer. Although the comparative similarities between the presence of terms like Verantwortung, Einheit, und Blut in the works of both Buber and Kafka make a compelling case for revealing Kafka's position on Zionism vis-à-vis Buber, [End Page 97] Nakazawa also keenly shows how Kafka differs from and even criticizes Buber. As Nakazawa notes, Kafka "glaubt, dass auch der Kulturzionismus unter der Führung Buber [die] Kernfrage [of Zionism] noch nicht genügend beantworte" (26), adding that "Kafkas Sicht auf den Zionismus […] ziemlich kritisch und skeptisch ist" (35). One tremendous reason for Kafka's skepticism of Zionism in any form emerges from the political and cultural uncertainties of the Great War and the crumbling of the Habsburg Empire as well as the ushering in of unknown nationalisms to replace the Empire. The issue of metaphor and Empire in Die Chinesische Mauer follows through into his fourth chapter, where he attempts to distill the symbolic relationship between China and Jewishness. Keen to argue against any claim that Kafka's writings on China could actually be about China, Nakazawa claims, "Meines Erachtens ist das Kaisertum eine ausgezeichnete Metapher, die Kafka einfiel, um das Problem des Judentums zu untersuchen und zu beschreiben" (85). Rather than giving the reader a firm, conclusive reading, however (and perhaps in truer fashion to Kafka's style of writing), the author spends much of this chapter giving us possible readings that range from textually fitting Duden's definitions of Kaisertum and Judentum, inasmuch as those definitions line up with one another in Kafka's writings on China, to interpreting those writings through an article written in Der Jude. These readings, following through in the subsequent chapters that treat the remaining works by Kafka, demonstrate the degree to which Kafka ultimately sides (or does not side) with Buber's view of Zionism mediated through religious Hasidism. These readings are especially significant to "Ein Bericht für eine Akademie" and "Schakale und Araber," as both were initially published in Der Jude under Buber's editorship. The reader learns from this book that these two stories were selected...

Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews and the Idea of the Promised Land Shalom Goldman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. There are whole libraries detailing the history of Zionism. Its beginnings in nineteenth-century Europe, its rise under Theodor Herzl in the 1890s, and its development, are well recorded. Shalom Goldman (of Emory University) has asked an intriguing parallel question: Who were the Christian supporters of the idea of a Jewish state over the years? His responses form the body of this book. Goldman's extensive introduction provides important background information on the fertile soil in which Zionism grew. Unfortunately, he neglects the enormous interest in archeology that exploded after the uncovering of the Rosetta Stone and continues today. This was paralleled by a fascination with the Bible among Christian ministers and scholars, leading to textual analysis of the life of Jesus. Regrettably, Goldman ignores these parallel elements. Once the narrative opens, however, Goldman has several fascinating stories to tell. He begins with Lawrence and Alice Oliphant, a wealthy English couple, and their connection to Naftali Herz-Imber, the composer of Hatikvah (the Israeli national anthem). The Oliphants became fascinated by Imber, a chameleonlike figure who traveled back and forth through several cultures. The trio traveled and lived together for several years, a fascinating grouping. Their connection provides a glimpse into the beguiling effect Palestine had on interested Europeans. In Chapter 2 Goldman explores Christian supporters of Theodor Herzl. In particular, it focuses on William Hechler, an Anglican priest who became close to Herzl as political Zionism was forming. Hechler had access to many high-ranking German officials, and was instrumental in Herzl's meetings with many of them. HerzPs failure to gain their support was a serious blow, but Hechler continued to support the program. As a proponent of the Jews' political success as a means for their ultimate conversion to Christianity, he serves as an important link to later Christian-Jewish relations. The first figure in the book to spend extensive time in Palestine is Rev. Herbert Danby, an early Christian supporter of Jewish settlement. Danby served as an Anglican priest in Jerusalem from 1919 to 1936, and provided important support for Jewish culture there. He befriended Joseph Klausner, who asserted forcefully that Jesus was a product of his time; Roman ascendance, the late Second-Temple era and the age of the Talmudic Rabbis. Another friend was the great poet H.N. Bialik, whose work Danby translated and helped make famous. In addition, Danby was a Hebrew scholar; his translation of the Mishnah is still widely used. After returning to Oxford in the 1930s, Danby continued to support Jewish settlement (and eventual independence) and also advocated Christian missionary work in the Holy Land. …

Twain's Admiration of Jews Conflicted; His Article of 100 Years Ago Seems Less Flattering Today

Reviewed by: Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern by Neil R. Davison Debra Shostak (bio) Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern, by Neil R. Davison. New York and London: Routledge Publishers, 2010. xi + 262 pp. $113.00 cloth. “‘What is a Jew in the first place?’” the protagonist of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife ponders: “the sound ‘Jew’ was not made like a rock in the world—some human voice once said ‘Djoo,’ pointed to somebody, and that was the beginning.”1 Roth’s Joycean “Djoo” suggests the questions that Neil R. Davison raises in his perceptive and stimulating Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern. Taking the “Djoo” as the male Jew, Davison asks: who is the Jew as a historically constituted, objectified, and racialized subject making the transition into modernity? How does the hint of mockery in Roth’s phonetic spelling translate into a gendering of the Jew, whose internalized position departs from the hyper-masculine Euro-American ideal? Davison pursues these questions through the confluence of racial, gendered, and religious constructions of Jewish masculinity appearing in the work of male writers, both Jewish and gentile, from the modern to the postmodern eras. Chapters focused on George Du Maurier, Theodor Herzl, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Roth probe how the discourses of the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have feminized the male Jew, and, in turn, how this construction of the Jew’s racial and gendered subjectivity affects his encounter with the modern world in each writer’s political and ethical imaginations. Drawing on an impressive array of materials—from cultural history, psychoanalysis, Judaic sources, philosophy, journalism, and letters, and citing such scholars as Sander Gilman, Daniel Boyarin, David Biale, and Emmanuel Lévinas, as well as influential turn-of-the-century work by Sigmund Freud and Otto Weininger—Davison paints a complex portrait of fin de siècle, modern, and postmodern Jewish masculinity.2 To do so, he explores intersecting binaries—Rabbinic/Reform (Halachic/Haskalah) Judaism, as well as “authentic/inauthentic, racial difference/humanity, hyper-male/feminized-male, colonial/postcolonial, and Diaspora/Zionist” oppositions (2). Indeed, each chapter is built around a dense interweaving of sources and conceptions of Jewishness, so that my summaries below can scarcely capture the nuances of Davison’s analyses. On balance, however, he argues that “gentile and Jewish male writers renegotiated masculinity by engaging the feminized Jew in their [End Page 379] works” and finds that the culturally assimilated Jewish writers forged their identities “through a hybrid Jewish masculinity combining the essence of Rabbinic edelkayt [the gentle, bookish, Talmudic masculine ideal] with strains of the politically active, liberal or leftist Western male” (14, 19). Davison’s thesis is illuminating and affords some fascinating stories. Chapter 1 reads George Du Maurier’s bestselling novel of 1894, Trilby, alongside the Dreyfus Affair, which began the same year.3 The cultural anxieties stoked by the rhetoric of race and gender link Trilby’s depiction of the sinister Jew, Svengali, with the threat the French perceived in Captain Alfred Dreyfus, wrongfully convicted of spying for Germany. Davison names a new category for the Jew, the “homme/femme fatale,” who is “malignantly feminine in [his] perverse sexual powers and creative genius for disguise and imitation” (27). He attributes Svengali’s dirty, money-grubbing, sexually ambiguous, predatory depiction, like the Dreyfus Affair, to the developing hysterical belief that “degenerate” Jews were fostering a world conspiracy to feminize European culture. As a complementary narrative of fin de siècle Europe, chapter 2 explores the work of Herzl, who is credited with founding Zionism. Herzl, known largely for his nonliterary writing, enables Davison to stake out the polar terms of male Jewish representation. Although Herzl struggled with an internalized image of his own Jewish racial effeminacy, Davison finds that he also engaged with the role of the Judaic religious tradition in his vision for a re-masculinized Jew and a nationalist cause. Davison argues that Herzl’s messianic vision, derived from the Judaic doctrine guiding Jews to “help other nations toward a spiritual enlightenment” and a “rational reconciliation of humanity,” forecast a Jewish state to “replace racial, gendered, and other...

0. Where did Zionism come from? The Zionist ideology is considered to have originated in Europe. Then, exactly where in Europe? Theodor Herzl, “the Father of Zionism,” who was raised and worked in the German-language world and is said to have turned to Zionism after he witnessed the Dreyfus Affair in France, is so famous that most people may think that Zionism was born in Western Europe. However, as Table 1 (on the last page) shows, the majority of Zionist leaders were born in Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire (particularly in the areas presently called Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Lithuania, and Poland). Yet, if we consider that the East followed the same path as the West, this fact would be insignificant. However, did the East really follow the West? I would like to emphasize three points that refute this notion and assert that these points affected the formation of the Zionist world view. For this, we have to consider what Zionism meant to Zionists in their local context, and not in too abstract a context such as Europe, the West, modernity, or the Jewish world. 1 The following historical-sociological research is based on an investigation of the Russian Zionists’ public discussions in Zionist periodicals published mainly in Russian. 2 (For more details on the first two points, see my article Tsurumi 2008.)

92 SHOFAR The Jews ofVienna in the Age of Franz Joseph, by Robert S. Wistrich. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 696 pp. n.p.I. Vienna's Jews around the turn of the twentieth century have been the subject of several major studies during the past few years. Books by William McCagg, Paul Hofmann, George Berkley, Marsha Rozenblit, Steven Beller, and the second edition of Peter Pulzer's classic, The Rise ofAnti-Semitism in Gennany and Austria, have all contributed to our knowledge of Europe's third largest (in 1910) and most culturally creative Jewish community. Of these recent works, Robert Wistrich's Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph is by far the most impressive in its sheer size and incredibly thorough research. Wistrich's title is unnecessarily modest both geographically and chronologically. Although the book's focus is certainly on Vienna, which was a magnet for Austria-Hungary's most talented Jews, Jews in the rest of the Monarchy are by no means ignored. Likewise, the author provides a generous introduction into the history of Austrian Jewry before the reign of the Emperor-King Franz Joseph. On the other hand, Wistrich has not attempted to be absolutely comprehensive in his coverage of Austrian Jewish history between 1848 and 1914. Topically rather than chronologically organized , The Jews of Vienna concentrates far more on political, intellectual, and cultural trends than it does on social developments. Above all it deals with the question of Jewish identity and how Austrian Jews-especially Jewish intellectuals such as Karl Kraus, Otto Weininger, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, and Joseph Roth-attempted to cope with a bewildering number of dramatic changes and challenges in the second half of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth century. These included emancipation, secularization, urbanization, industrialization, democracy, and above all the rise of modern, political antisemitism. . The most common response to these various forms of modernization was assimilation, perhaps best articulated by Adolf Jellinek in his mouthpiece , Die Neuzeit. But for Jellinek and most other Viennese Jews, assimilation did not mean the total abandonment of Jewish traditions and identity; rather it meant that Jews should be no different from other Austrians in their speech, clothing, manners, and social behavior. Above all, they should be loyal sons of the Habsburg fatherland. Such assimilationists generally favored the German Liberal party which stood for representative government, secularism, and free-trade capitalism. After 1895, however, the German Liberals were conspicuously silent and indifferent to the rise of antisemitism, thus causing most Viennese Jews to transfer their loyalties to the Social Democratic party. Volume 9, No.2 l-Vinter 1991 93 Wistrich believes that the rise of the antisemitic Christian Social party and the appointment of its leader, Karl Lueger, as mayor of Vienna in 1897 were far more significant than antisemitic developments in neighboring Germany or Hungary. Although Austrian antisemitism was a prerequisite for both the first great Zionist leader, Nathan Birnbaum, and Zionism's most famous and successful exponent, Theodor Herzl, the great majority of preWorld War I Viennese Jews rejected Zionism and preferred fighting antisemitism through the Austrian Israelite Union, founded in 1886 by Rabbi Joseph Samuel Bloch. The activities of the Union, especially its Defense Bureau , prove that assimilationist Jews did not blindly resign themselves to antisemitic rule. On the contrary, the Union was a forum for the forceful expression ofJewish pride and identity. As for Herzl, his rejection of assimilation and passionate espousal of Zionism did not result from anyone antisemitic event, not even the Dreyfus affair which he witnessed in Paris. Herzl differed sharply from the assimilationists in maintaining that modern antisemitism was a product of emancipation and Jewish-Gentile economic competition; it was not a mere remnant of the pre-emancipation age as Jewish liberals believed. Unfortunately, Herzl's conclusion, that Jews could never assimilate, was all too eagerly exploited by antisemites, as the co-editor and proprietor of the Neue Freie Presse, Eduard Bacher, warned the Zionist leader already in February 1896. There is little to criticize in Wistrich's masterful study. The judgments of the author, an Associate Professor of Modern European and Jewish History at Hebrew University, are...

Theodore Herzl, a Vienna journalist, realized that anti-Semitism, dramatically illustrated by the Dreyfus Affair in 1890s France, would never be stemmed by the attempts of Jews to assimilate. The publication of his Der Judenstaat in 1896 began the political movement for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It caught on in Europe, but was moribund in the United States until World War I. Melvin I. Urofsky shows how the Zionist movement was Americanized by Louis D. Brandeis and other reformers. He portrays the disputes between assimilationist and conservative Jews and the difficulties impeding the movement until Arab riots, British treachery, and the Nazi horrors of World War II reunited American Jewry. Melvin I. Urofsky, a professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University, has written a new preface for this Bison Book edition. His other books include Felix Frankfurter: Judicial Restraint and Individual Liberties.

Some years before the 1896 appearance of Theodore Herzl’ Der Judenstaat, Joseph Marco Baruch (Istanbul, 1872–Florence, 1899) articulated his own brand of Zionism. His life and work provide alternative Jewish geographies for the study of Zionism that complicate established categories, such as the “cultural/East” and “political/West,” a binary that also posits Jewish identity and political action as disjoined spheres. Neither premise applies to the work of Joseph Marco Baruch. Conceptually, his social vision juxtaposed realpolitik and a national-historical Jewish identity, and his activism was well received in European and Mediterranean circles. As in all similar movements, Zionism was shaped by power struggles between leaders and ideologues; biographical contrasts between Theodore Herzl and Joseph Marco Baruch draw attention to personal privilege and its role in influencing the institutional course of Zionism at a critical historical juncture. The case of Joseph Marco Baruch invites discussion of the early 1890s as an important, but overlooked, period in the development of political Zionism.

Licencia CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Int Este artículo busca analizar el rol de algunos intelectuales durante los primeros meses de la pandemia de la covid-19, entendiendo en qué sentido su discurso se asume como un contrapeso a la hegemonía de los expertos en el tema de la salud. Tomamos como objeto de estudio varios enunciados ejemplares de Noam Chomsky, lingüista y activista político estadounidense, que se produjeron desde principios de marzo hasta mayo de 2020 en relación con la covid-19. Intentamos comprender los puntos principales que marcan el discurso de Chomsky relacionándolos con el ethos discursivo (Maingueneau, 2020) de un "compromiso intelectual" (Bourdieu, 2003). Queremos entender cómo se construye la trayectoria de la imagen pública de Chomsky como activista político, a partir de su definición como uno de los mayores intelectuales vivos del mundo, y cómo él y ciertos medios de comunicación utilizan ese tipo de credencial para erigirse en una figura poderosa, siempre demandada para hablar de cualquier tema de actualidad, incluso una pandemia. Nos sustentamos sobre la hipótesis de que, para Chomsky, la explicación de los hechos históricos se hace siempre con una visión holística, conectando la pandemia de la covid-19 con otros problemas mayores y otras amenazas para la humanidad. En otras palabras, Chomsky se asume a sí mismo como portavoz de la humanidad, preocupado por problemas mayores: una pandemia no puede ser subestimada, pero el calentamiento global y la crisis económica creada por la debacle del neoliberalismo, así como las posibilidades de guerra nuclear, son amenazas mucho mayores para la supervivencia de la especie humana y el mantenimiento del planeta. También aportamos una visión general de tres importantes intelectuales que igualmente actuaron y contribuyeron con sus reflexiones sobre la pandemia de la covid-19 durante sus meses iniciales: se trata de Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben y Byung-Chul Han. El propósito de traer estas distintas visiones es, en una primera instancia, comparar hasta qué punto pueden asemejarse al discurso chomskyano, pero sobre todo cómo se construye el discurso intelectual en tiempos de pandemia global frente a los discursos de los expertos o especialistas en salud que ocupan los espacios de autoridad discursivos en los medios de comunicación durante una crisis sanitaria.

This article investigates the relationship between Theodor Herzl’s journalistic career and his Zionist enterprise. Contrary to the received wisdom that Herzl’s post in the Neue Freie Presse had little to do with his Zionist vision, it is argued that his Zionist awakening sprang essentially from his experience as an influential journalist working in the early days of mass-circulation newspapers. It is further shown that once Herzl took up the Zionist cause he made a sophisticated use of mass-circulation newspapers and of his post in the Neue Freie Presse to bring about and propagate his Zionist plan. In the final analysis, it is suggested that Herzl’s position as a leading journalist working in the early days of mass-circulation played a key role in shaping his particular strand of political Zionism as well as in securing his initial leadership of the Zionist movement.