Israel
Zangwill was an English-born Zionist and writer. His early life
was spent in the East End of London, and he was a teacher in the
Jewish Free School there. In later life, his friends included Jerome
K. Jerome and H. G. Wells. He wrote a very influential novel Children
of the Ghetto (1892), and his play The Melting Pot was a hit in
the USA in 1908-1909.The latter received its most recent production
at New York's Metropolitan Playhouse, March 2006.
He
also wrote mystery works, such as The Big Bow Mystery. However,
he is best known for coining the slogan, "a land without
a people for a people without a land" to describe the nation
that is now Israel. However he did not invent the phrase: in its
original form "A country without a nation for a nation without
a country" it is attributed to Lord Shaftesbury.[1]
Zangwill,
a British Jew, founded an organization called the Jewish Territorialist
Organization in 1905, the aim of which was to create a Jewish
homeland in whatever possible territory in the world (and not
necessarily in what today is the state of Israel). Zangwill died
in 1926 in Midhurst, West Sussex after trying to create the Jewish
state in such diverse places as Canada, Australia, Mesopotamia,
Uganda and Cyrenaica.
Israel
Zangwill was the father of Oliver L. Zangwill, a prominent British
psychologist. |
