"Manya Shochat was an outstanding personality of the Second Aliyah, which attracted several hundred young women to pursue agricultural labor in the communes which eventually emerged as the first kibbutzim. This lecture will bring us back to Manya’s activities while still in Russia in the years 1902 and 1903, when she and her left-wing Zionist friends experimented with violent self-defense against pogromists. Then we will follow her to Palestine where she and her husband, Israel Shochat, channeled these same values and practices into the institutions of Labor Zionism.

Deborah Hertz holds the Herman Wouk Chair in Modern Jewish Studies at UCSD, where she has taught since 2004. She previously was on the faculty of the State University of New York at Binghamton and Sarah Lawrence College. She has been a visiting professor at the Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, and Harvard University. Her major books are Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin and How Jews Became Germans. This lecture is from her book-in-progress, Sailing to Utopia: Jewish Women’s Journeys from Odessa to Jaffa.
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