ABSTRACT
Abba Kovner, ghetto resistance commander at age twenty-five of Jewish partisans in Vilna and the forests during World War II. He was a leading figure in the postwar Brichah movement that brought the remnant of European Jewry to Palestine, Givati Brigade information officer in Israel's War of Independence. Yet most Americans, including American Jews, first became aware of him in the early 1960s as a prominent figure in Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. When World War II ended, Kovner was fiercely critical of Jews who wanted to rebuild Jewish life in the continent that had just spat them out: Jews, he insisted, should not settle in a graveyard. Kovner was a man of paradoxes. He was a lifelong member of the dogmatically left-wing and atheist Zionist movement Hashomer Hatzair and the Mapam Party, but he rejected the movement's commitment to international class solidarity in favor of his overriding concern, the survival of the Jewish people.
