Jew Oughta Know

Is there a just way to partition Palestine between Arabs and Jews? The United Nations considers that question, and November 29, 1947, goes down as an historic day for the Jewish People.

As the threat to European Jewry rises to desperate levels, the Zionist movement launches a secret, high-risk rescue operation, and prepares for war.

From out in the Atlantic Ocean the Zionist movement suffers serious setbacks in 1939, while the Palestinian national movement plays a destructive zero-sum game.

Arab nationalism turns towards violence. The Zionists try to defend Jewish immigration. And the British try to preserve stability in the region. Then the Nazis start meddling in Palestine.

The nature of the Arab-Jewish conflict completely changed in 1929, when the Arabs massacred Jews throughout Palestine. With the British in charge, the Arabs rioting, and the Nazis just over the horizon in Europe, the Zionist project was entering a dark and challenging era.

Einstein, Ben-Gurion, Weizmann, and Jabotinsky all bring different ideas about Zionism to the Roaring Twenties in Palestine.

The Arab-Israeli conflict begins at Tel Hai on March 1, 1920. These first instances of violence set the precedent for the next century of Jewish-Arab relations.

A hundred years ago the British issued the Balfour Declaration, promising to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Today we're looking at why the British were interested in Palestine in the first place -- from the exigencies of World War One to Christian prophecy.

WANTED: Renewed Jewish Homeland Seeks Socialist, Revolutionary-Minded Gender Equality Activists to Perform Hard Labor, Drain Swamps, Debate Ideology, and Build Out Their Jewish Minds and Bodies on a Collective Farm. Don't Apply, Just Come.

Today I interview Kathy Kacer and Jordana Lebowitz, who have written a book, To Look a Nazi In the Eye. It's an account of Jordana's experience attending the 2015 trial of Oskar Groening, a Nazi SS officer stationed at Auschwitz. Was he complicit in the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews? Is it too late for justice? And how did this experience inspire Jordana to devote herself to human rights and Holocaust education?

How to revive a language that hasn't been spoken for 18 centuries? The Jews had been working to revive Hebrew for decades, but it was the Zionists -- led by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and his family -- who succeeded in turning Hebrew into the national language.

It's not enough just to create a new Jewish homeland. We need a New Jew. Physically strong, spiritually renewed, and connected to the land through hard physical labor. The big picture of Zionism that is emerging is that it's a movement to create an entirely new kind of Judaism for a new phase of our history.