The Aaronsohn Saga
The Aaronsohn Saga

Author: Shmuel Katz

Publisher: Gefen Publishing House Ltd

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9789652294166

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A celebrated botanist, who had won world fame as the discoverer of 'wild wheat, ' Aaron Aaronsohn (1876 1919) created the first Jewish Agricultural Experiment Station in Palestine then under Turkish rule in 1910. His venture was supported and funded from the u.s. by a group which included Julius Rosenwald, Justices Louis D. Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter (both later on the u.s. Supreme Court), Judah L. Magnes (later President of the Hebrew University), and Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah. In World War I, reacting against the oppressive Turkish regime, Aaronsohn founded a Jewish spy organization, nili, to help the British in the forthcoming battle for Palestine. Here is told the story of Aaronsohn, who is revealed as a master of strategy, and his sister Sarah, whose self-sacrificing devotion to the cause shows her to be a great historic personality in her own right. Historian Shmuel Katz here rectifies the absence of a comprehensive biography of Aaronsohn and the nili spy ring. Meticulously researched British War Office intelligence documents and the letters and field reports of nili s central figures illustrate the crucial contribution made by nili to the British conquest of Palestine. Powerfully written, with deep sensitivity to the emotional lives of the people portrayed, The Aaronsohn Saga is both solid history and a marvelous read.

The Woman Who Fought an Empire
The Woman Who Fought an Empire

Author: Gregory J. Wallance

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2018-03-01

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1612349439

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"The Woman Who Fought an Empire" tells the improbable odyssey of a spirited young woman--the daughter of Romanian-born Jewish settlers in Palestine--and her journey from unhappy housewife to daring leader of a notorious Middle East spy ring.

Lawrence and Aaronsohn
Lawrence and Aaronsohn

Author: Ronald Florence

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 556

ISBN-13: 9780670063512

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How a second lieutenant from Oxfordshire and a Jewish agronomist from Palestine mapped the land and conflicts of the modern Middle East. Historian Florence provides new perspectives on the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In the turmoil of World WarI

Spies in Palestine
Spies in Palestine

Author: James Srodes

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2017-09-12

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1640090053

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Sarah Aaronsohn was a twenty–first century woman in a nineteenth–century world. She and her siblings were born as part of the first wave of Jewish immigrants who fled the pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe in the 1880s, settling in the province of Syria–Palestine. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914 the settlers had come a dramatic distance in creating the Eretz Israel of their Biblical prophecies. Sarah's home village of Zichron Ya'akov brought prosperity to their lands between the Mediterranean coast and the Mount Carmel range. But when the Ottoman Turkish Empire sided with Kaiser Wilhelm II and the other Central Powers in World War I, the Jewish settlements faced cruel oppressions. This book describes how the Aaronsohns, one of the most prominent families in the province, came to commit themselves and their comrades to the Allied side and how they formed the NILI espionage organization to spy against the Turkish Army. Late in the war, in 1917, Sarah assumed command of the spy network as the group's penetration of the Turkish army reached a critical juncture. Sarah was idolized by T.E. Lawrence, the fabled Lawrence of Arabia who dedicated his flowery biography, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, to her.

The Nili Spies
The Nili Spies

Author: Anita Engle

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-05

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1135216657

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An extraordinary tale, much-neglected by historians, of courage, bravery and eventual tragedy which took place during the First World War in the Middle East. It is the story of a small group of people, of whom Sarah and Aaron Aaronsohn were the core, who were devoted to the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, and who were convinced that it was in imminent danger of extinction from the Turks.They resolved to help the British in Egypt by collecting military intelligence. Unfortunately, as Peter Calvocoressi points out, their understanding of the British position was quite wrong...[their] miscalculations created the tragedy which this book recounts...'

The Woman Who Fought an Empire
The Woman Who Fought an Empire

Author: Gregory J. Wallance

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2018-03-01

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1640120068

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Though she lived only to twenty-seven, Sarah Aaronsohn led a remarkable life. The Woman Who Fought an Empire tells the improbable but true odyssey of a bold young woman—the daughter of Romanian-born Jewish settlers in Palestine—who became the daring leader of a Middle East spy ring. Following the outbreak of World War I, Sarah learned that her brother Aaron had formed Nili, an anti-Turkish spy ring, to aid the British in their war against the Ottomans. Sarah, who had witnessed the atrocities of the Armenian genocide by the Turks, believed that only the defeat of the Ottoman Empire could save the Palestinian Jews from a similar fate. Sarah joined Nili, eventually rising to become the organization’s leader. Operating behind enemy lines, she and her spies furnished vital information to British intelligence in Cairo about the Turkish military forces until she was caught and tortured by the Turks in the fall of 1917. To protect her secrets, Sarah got hold of a gun and shot herself. The Woman Who Fought an Empire, set at the birth of the modern Middle East, rebukes the Hollywood stereotype of women spies as femme fatales and is both an espionage thriller and a Joan of Arc tale.

The House of Truth
The House of Truth

Author: Brad Snyder

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-01-04

Total Pages: 825

ISBN-13: 0190261994

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In 1912, a group of ambitious young men, including future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter and future journalistic giant Walter Lippmann, became disillusioned by the sluggish progress of change in the Taft Administration. The individuals started to band together informally, joined initially by their enthusiasm for Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose campaign. They self-mockingly called the 19th Street row house in which they congregated the "House of Truth," playing off the lively dinner discussions with frequent guest (and neighbor) Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. about life's verities. Lippmann and Frankfurter were house-mates, and their frequent guests included not merely Holmes but Louis Brandeis, Herbert Hoover, Herbert Croly - founder of the New Republic - and the sculptor (and sometime Klansman) Gutzon Borglum, later the creator of the Mount Rushmore monument. Weaving together the stories and trajectories of these varied, fascinating, combative, and sometimes contradictory figures, Brad Snyder shows how their thinking about government and policy shifted from a firm belief in progressivism - the belief that the government should protect its workers and regulate monopolies - into what we call liberalism - the belief that government can improve citizens' lives without abridging their civil liberties and, eventually, civil rights. Holmes replaced Roosevelt in their affections and aspirations. His famous dissents from 1919 onward showed how the Due Process clause could protect not just business but equality under the law, revealing how a generally conservative and reactionary Supreme Court might embrace, even initiate, political and social reform. Across the years, from 1912 until the start of the New Deal in 1933, the remarkable group of individuals associated with the House of Truth debated the future of America. They fought over Sacco and Vanzetti's innocence; the dangers of Communism; the role the United States should play the world after World War One; and thought dynamically about things like about minimum wage, child-welfare laws, banking insurance, and Social Security, notions they not only envisioned but worked to enact. American liberalism has no single source, but one was without question a row house in Dupont Circle and the lives that intertwined there at a crucial moment in the country's history.

The Hidden History of the Balfour Declaration
The Hidden History of the Balfour Declaration

Author: Sahar Huneidi

Publisher: OR Books

Published: 2019-06-27

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 168219146X

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Contained on a single page, the Balfour Declaration was sent by Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, in November 1917. It read, in part, “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” This brief missive was to be critical in determining the history of the Middle East, from the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 to the present day. And yet, despite its importance, the true origins of the Declaration remain obscure. The Declaration, Sahar Huneidi observes, was a work of carefully crafted ambiguity. It was this deliberate openness that allowed the British government, years later, to reshape its meaning, and even the history of its drafting, to support specific foreign policy ends. This process, Huneidi argues, was facilitated by a subsequent document: a little-known, handwritten memo by the Under-Secretary of the Colonial Office, William Ormsby-Gore, recounting from memory discussions surrounding the Declaration’s drafting. Employing careful detective work and a rich knowledge of the subject matter, Huneidi reveals how, faced with a paucity of official records, Ormsby-Gore’s account became the basis for a decision on Palestine that had devastating consequences for the stability of the region. This concise, eloquent book provides a vivid case study of the rewriting and repurposing of history, and compellingly recontextualizes the ongoing struggles of Israel–Palestine. Sahar Huneidi has a BA in Political Science from the American University of Beirut, and a Ph.D. from the University of Manchester, where her thesis formed the basis of her subsequent published work on Herbert Samuel. She has contributed numerous articles to academic journals and has edited studies on Israel/Palestine. She has also received diploma certificates in art history from Christie’s Education. She is the director of East & West Publishing and lives mainly in London.

Lawrence in Arabia
Lawrence in Arabia

Author: Scott Anderson

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2013-08-06

Total Pages: 844

ISBN-13: 0385532938

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One of the Best Books of the Year: The Christian Science Monitor NPR The Seattle Times St. Louis Post-Dispatch Chicago Tribune A New York Times Notable Book Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography The Arab Revolt against the Turks in World War I was, in the words of T. E. Lawrence, “a sideshow of a sideshow.” As a result, the conflict was shaped to a remarkable degree by a small handful of adventurers and low-level officers far removed from the corridors of power. At the center of it all was Lawrence himself. In early 1914 he was an archaeologist excavating ruins in Syria; by 1917 he was riding into legend at the head of an Arab army as he fought a rearguard action against his own government and its imperial ambitions. Based on four years of intensive primary document research, Lawrence in Arabia definitively overturns received wisdom on how the modern Middle East was formed.

Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment
Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment

Author: Brad Snyder

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2022-08-23

Total Pages: 735

ISBN-13: 1324004886

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The definitive biography of Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court justice and champion of twentieth-century American liberal democracy. The conventional wisdom about Felix Frankfurter—Harvard law professor and Supreme Court justice—is that he struggled to fill the seat once held by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Scholars have portrayed Frankfurter as a judicial failure, a liberal lawyer turned conservative justice, and the Warren Court’s principal villain. And yet none of these characterizations rings true. A pro-government, pro-civil rights liberal who rejected shifting political labels, Frankfurter advocated for judicial restraint—he believed that people should seek change not from the courts but through the democratic political process. Indeed, he knew American presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, advised Franklin Roosevelt, and inspired his students and law clerks to enter government service. Organized around presidential administrations and major political and world events, this definitive biography chronicles Frankfurter’s impact on American life. As a young government lawyer, he befriended Theodore Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, and Holmes. As a Harvard law professor, he earned fame as a civil libertarian, Zionist, and New Deal power broker. As a justice, he hired the first African American law clerk and helped the Court achieve unanimity in outlawing racially segregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education. In this sweeping narrative, Brad Snyder offers a full and fascinating portrait of the remarkable life and legacy of a long misunderstood American figure. This is the biography of an Austrian Jewish immigrant who arrived in the United States at age eleven speaking not a word of English, who by age twenty-six befriended former president Theodore Roosevelt, and who by age fifty was one of Franklin Roosevelt’s most trusted advisers. It is the story of a man devoted to democratic ideals, a natural orator and often overbearing justice, whose passion allowed him to amass highly influential friends and helped create the liberal establishment.