Anita Shapira: Ben-Gurion: Father of Modern Israel. New Haven, London (Yale University Press) 2014. IX, 273 S. (Jewish Lives).

Shelfmark: LAK-692

By Sandra Goldstein

Anita Shapira, professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and the 2008 Israel Prize for Jewish History laureate, has a special talent for telling life stories. She demonstrated it already in her former biographies: “Berl Katznelson: Biography of a Socialist Zionist” (1984), “Yigal Alon, Native Son” (2008), and “Yosef Haim Brenner: A Life” (2014). The present biography on David Ben-Gurion, part of a project by Yale University Press entitled ‘Jewish Lives’, is no exception. 
Condensing David Ben-Gurion’s volcanic life into two-hundred-odd pages is no easy task. Much has been written about Ben-Gurion, the Zionist prophet and founder of modern Israel, the authoritarian leader, the inventive politician and Prime Minister, who, in the words of his Zionist fellow leader Berl Katznelson, was “history’s gift to the Jewish people”: “Ben-Gurion: The Armed Prophet” (1968), written by Ben-Gurion’s confidant Michael Bar Zohar,  Shabtai Teveth’s massive and comprehensive political biography “The Burning Ground” (1997), and Shlomo Aronson’s “David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Renaissance” (2011), are just a few examples.  

In her book, Shapira draws on her own extensive research on Ben-Gurion, whom she is fascinated with ever since she interviewed him as a fresh university graduate back in the 1960s.  Much of her research is based on the abundant archival material extant in Ben-Gurion’s private files in Sdeh-Boker as well as on unpublished correspondence. 
In the introduction to her book the author states that, unlike most of the other biographs who focus on Ben-Gurion’s public persona, her intention is to address the private person – the autodidact, the temperamental, insatiable reader, the distant character who kept his feelings to himself, the complicated man, the family man, and the man in love – and to shed new light on the leader from this perspective. While doing so she goes beyond the personal life to narrate the pre-state and early statehood era, and she does it with her master-brush.  

According to Shapira, David Ben-Gurion’s leadership reached its peak during 1942-1953, when, facing the disastrous fate of European Jewry, he foresaw the developments which would enable the implementation of the Jewish statehood. He devoted his life to the cause and sacrificed everything else including his private life. Ben-Gurion realized the Zionist dream, says Shapira, and if that necessitated wars, casualties, removing the Arabs from their homes, fierce opponents, a lonely existence – he was ready to pay the price. 

Shapira characterizes Ben-Gurion as born authoritarian leader and goes on to write that “[he] liked to argue that history is made by the masses, not individuals. But just as Lenin brought the Bolshevik Revolution into the world and Churchill delivered a fighting Britain, so with Ben-Gurion and the Jewish state. He knew how to create and exploit the circumstances that made its birth possible.” (245f)

David Ben-Gurion was a controversial figure already during his lifetime.  His legacy continues to be widely debated and criticized until today. Shapira does not judge the man. She obscures neither his political failures nor his personal weaknesses, and does not hesitate to discuss his public achievements critically. The outcome is a closely woven account of Israeli history, framed in terms of the life trajectory of the man who revolutionized Jewish history.

Dr. Sandra Goldstein is a cultural historian with emphasis on Jewish Cultural history and Israel Studies. She is co-founder and director of the Center for Israel Studies, Vienna.