Man of the Hour: Avraham Herzfeld

So I've been reading this book for my upcoming Honors Government class called Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, and it is surprisingly more interesting than I originally thought it would be. In case you haven't heard of it, it is a collection of speeches by a man named Plunkitt, and he was a District Leader in New York City in the early 1900s. Plunkitt has an incredibly straightforward way of speaking, and he really throws light on what the world of politics is like. He talks about how to be a good politician and explains why his organization, Tammany Hall, has been around for so long.

So, in honor of politicians everywhere, I'd like to dedicate this article to someone I don't even know. His name is Avraham Herzfeld (yes, Avraham, with a "v") and he is a well-known Israeli politician. This is his picture off of Wikipedia:

The guy was a huge supporter of the Zionist movement (the movement to give the Israelites their own country).

Avraham Herzfeld was born on the 21st of June (here I'll give a shoutout to a friend of mine who shares his birthdate) in the year 1891. He was born in the Russian Empire, in a place called Stavich (today we would call it Ukraine). He went to a Jewish religious school called a yeshiva, and was eventually made into a rabbi. (What? A religious politician? No way.) When he was only 15, he joined the Socialist Zionists. (Holy crapper! A Commie-Jew mashup?!) At 19, he was arrested for revolutionary activities and was exiled to Siberia. So he had a pretty hard early life, and he was a bit before his time with his Socialist "revolutionary activities", but whatever. Siberia, though...that bites.

At the chipper age of 23, he moved to Palestine (then controlled by the Ottomans) and became a farmer. During World War I, the Jews living in Ottoman-controlled Palestine were getting a little feisty, and Herzfeld decided to get feisty with 'em. For a four year period after that (age 23-27) he was a member of a Jewish Labor Party, and he got his start in politics at age 28 when he started his own labor party. He remained a member until the age of 39. At the age of 29, this guy got busy. He started the Histadrut (a powerful coalition of trade unions that still exists today) and he was also an active leader of the Agricultural Association where he lived.

His work in the Agricultural Association allowed him to spend the next 40 years of his life building new settlements for people in Palestine. At age 48, he joined the Jewish National Fund and stayed there until his death. The Fund was an organization dedicated to buying up new plots of land for Palestine. A colorful fact about his personality was that he would occasionally burst out into song in the middle of his speeches. So he's a merry-making rabbi Commie politician. This guy is a little bit of everything.

He was elected to the Knesset (Israel's Congress) at age 48, and he was re-elected four times after that, serving until he was 64. He was a prominent member of the Finance Committee, and after he retired, he worked for the elderly. (The blind leading the blind, I say.) At the age of 81, he was awarded the Israel Prize, and he died the next year on August 30th, 1973. His house, like all famous people's houses, is now a museum.

Seeing as this post is a little shorter than the other two (do you really expect me to write a lot about a Jewish politician?) I am going to go a little off-topic. The first big thing that I plan to do to actually get myself to WRITE something is NaNoWriMo. If any of you don't know what that is, it stands for National Novel Writing Month, and it takes place in November. Basically, you have a month to write a 50,000 word novel, and I am committing myself to succeeding this year.

I prefer to put a significant amount of planning into it before I actually write, and all the planning (or most of it) will be posted on this blog, since this is supposed to spur on my writing career. Alright, well that's that. There's my post. I hope that I made Herzfeld's little slice of history interesting for you. And I hope that you'll come back to read more when I post it. Until then.

P.S. I'm getting into a habit of ending with a YouTube video, but it's a good way to end. Since I spent this post talking about minorities (Commie rabbi politicians) I'd like to send you to this very enlightening and humorous video that makes all of us feel a little foolish for what we sometimes say.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCgx8zM3woQ