My scholaractivity is based on the premise that history is crucial for understanding reality:its' shortcomings as well as its' possibilities and limitations. Accordingly, myprimary area of interest is modern history of Jewish politics. Fortunatelyenough, I have the advantage of cultivating a field that was marked anddeveloped already by prominent scholars in the last 200 years. My specialinterest is to find and define political nuances, mainly within the JewishLabor Movement, which emerged in the larger context of modernization. Morespecifically, this movement was forged in the framework of industrialization,emancipation, urbanization and secularization, all of which had to do directlyor indirectly with politics.
Scholarsagree that until the early modern period, Jews – being a minority within Christianor Islamic realms - either remained outside the political arena or, at best,were active within it in a partial, limited fashion. Challenges of modernitytransformed things for good. In short, from late 18th century on,Jews could either 'delete' their Jewish identity; reform it into various sortsof Jewish confessions; regroup themselves in a renewed socio-spiritual"Ghetto"; and – what did most of them – redefine themselves incompeting versions along national concepts.
Members ofJewish Labor Movement – rank and file as well as prominent leaders of all sorts– were pivot in the process of Jewish modern nationalization schemes. On theone hand there was a fierce and bitter battle among these different Jewishnational projects, but on the other, no doubt they all shared basically onecentric notion: Jews ought to take an active part in the emerging new order. Thequestions of course were 'how', 'who', 'when', 'where' and the like. Thesuccess of Zionism brought about also chalenges, both in the field ofhistorical research and that of politics. Hence the importance of historicalresearch particularly focused on politics.
The mainassumption I am using in order to decipher political history is that each andevery political factor should be measured mainly against its' closest rival onthe scale, while taking into close account specific questions presented byreality. In other words, the spotlight must be directed to the tensions amongrhetoric, ideology, achievements, failures etc. After some 25 years of academicendeavor on my behalf, I can unequivocally state that I have found thisfundamental assumption to be convincing, useful, effective, and productive. Iwish to believe that I managed to express it in my published studies.