Abraham Goldfaden - Goldfaden and Zionism

Goldfaden and Zionism

Goldfaden had an on-again off-again relationship with Zionism. Some of his earliest poetry was Zionist avant la lettre and one of his last plays was written in Hebrew; several of his plays were implicitly or explicitly Zionist (Shulamith set in Jerusalem, Mashiach Tzeiten?! ending with its protagonists abandoning New York for Palestine); he served as a delegate from Paris to the World Zionist Congress in 1900. Still, he spent most of his life (and set slightly more than half of his plays) in the Pale of Settlement and in the adjoining Jewish areas in Romania, and when he left it was never to go to Palestine, but to cities such as New York, London or Paris. This might be understandable when the number of his potential Jewish spectators in Palestine in his time was very small.