"Why Don't You All Go to Hell?" The Life of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Part 1

Ze’ev Jabotinsky could have been a great Russian novelist. Everyone, including the Russian novelists, said so. Instead, a spring evening in Odessa in 1903 set him on the hardest road available to a Jew in the Russian Empire, and he never got off it.

This week Jay goes solo for the first episode in a four part series about Jabotinsky’s life.

In first episode of the series, we get into:

• What growing up in Odessa would mean for what Jabotinsky became

• How the Kishinev pogrom influenced his perspective on where Zionism was and where it needs to go

• Why he ran out of patience for the leaders of Zionism.

• His perspective on the importance of Bialik’s poem “In the City of Slaughter”

• The only four words that he and Herzl ever exchanged

• Constantinople, the Young Turks, and why he decided to side with the Allies in World War I