Introduction

The only visible result [of the Dreyfus Affair] was that it gave birth to the Zionist movement—the only political answer Jews have ever found to antisemitism and the only ideology in which they have ever taken seriously a hostility that would place them in the center of world events. Marie Syrkin was a great figure in the Labor Zionist movement and close friend of Golda Meir. She was one of the first people to recognize that Hitler's chief war aim was the destruction of European Jewry and its civilization, and to say so—in the pages of the Labor Zionist monthly Jewish Frontier in November 1942. The moral failure of ignoring the Holocaust was now compounded by a related failure: having averted their eyes from the destruction of European Jewry, they now looked away from one of the most impressive assertions of the will to live that a martyred people has ever made.