An Austrian-Jewish Intellectual’s Peripatetic Journey

Born in Prague in 1891, Hans Kohn was the prolific author of numerous erudite and sophisticated works on history, Judaism, and nationalism. His life, chronicled in a recent biography by Adi Gordon, can be understood as a series of disillusionments: in his youth he was an active Zionist; he later became a pacifist; by 1929 he rejected Zionism altogether, moving to the U.S., where he became a major figure in the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism. At the beginning of World War II, he abandoned pacifism (but not anti-Zionism) and later became a cold warrior. He died in 1971, disillusioned with America’s conduct of the Vietnam war. Allan Arkush, while praising Gordon’s work, questions his conclusion that there is much to learn from Kohn’s “Sisyphean struggle with nationalism”: