SOURCE: "The Jewishness and Zionism of Harold Laski," in Midstream, Vol. 23, No. 9, November, 1977, pp. 72-7.

In the following essay, Gorni discusses Laski's attitude toward his own Jewishness, and toward the cause of Zionism.

Since the early days of European socialism, the attitude of left-wing Jewish intellectuals to Judaism and Zionism has always been problematical. Many of them were torn between Jewish loyalties and the conscious desire to escape their origins. Harold Laski, one of the outstanding and most influential left-wing intellectuals in the Englishspeaking world in the nineteen thirties and forties, did not escape this personal conflict. But, then, his entire personality and personal history were marked by paradoxical contrasts. He was an iconoclast and a believer; a romantic rationalist; an inspired and beloved teacher who left no heirs; an influential thinker who did not always plumb the depths of the problems he studied; a brilliant speaker who...