The Maccabaean's Message: A Study in American Zionism Until World War I *

Four years after the first Zionist Congress at Basel, the Federation of American Zionists launched its official monthly journal, The Maccabaean. The magazine (in its inaugural issue) declared its devotion to the “living literature and life of the Jewish people,” and avowed rather ambitious aims:

To reconstruct the Jewish people, to lead them to an organized national existence, to make Jewish religious life possible, to foster the study of Jewish literature and history, to provide a stable home for the oppressed and downtrodden of our race. ¹