Jacob Chazan

Ya'akov Hazan (; 4 June 1899 – 22 July 1992) was an Israeli politician and social activist.

Biography Hazan was born in 1899 in Brest-Litovsk in the Russian Empire (now Brest, Belarus) to parents Haim Yehuda Hazan and Malka Kaminetzki. He studied in a Heder and a Hebrew high school. In 1915, he was among the founders of the "Hebrew Scouts movement" in Poland (later to become Hashomer Hatzair), where he was also one of the first members of HeHalutz. He studied at Warsaw Polytechnic. He immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1923, working in an orchard in Hadera and in drying swamps in the Beit She'an valley. In 1926, he joined Kibbutz "Hashomer HaTzair B", which would later establish Mishmar HaEmek.

Hazan became a central figure in the Kibbutz Artzi movement. He actively participated in turning the movement into a kernel of a political party. He served in various positions of the Histadrut and the Zionist movement and major Yishuv institutions. Along with Meir Yaari, he led HaShomer Hatzair, Kibbutz Artzi and Mapam for decades, characterizing those movements by identification with the Soviet Union and Communism.

A center for social justice at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute in Jerusalem, a democratic school in Kfar Saba and a street in Haifa are named after him

Selected writings The Labor Movement and the War (1943) The Kibbutz in the Test of Time (1958) Conclusions and Future Tasks (1964) At the Crossroads of Decisions (1968) Confusion, Protest and Solution (1974) A New Beginning (1988) Childhood and Youth (1993), autobiography