Marie Syrkin

Marie Syrkin (March 23, 1899 – February 2, 1989) was an American writer, translator, educator, and Zionist activist.

Biography Born in Bern, Switzerland, she was the daughter of the Socialist Zionist theoretician Nachman Syrkin and his wife Bassya Syrkin (née Osnos), a feminist socialist Zionist. After stays in Germany and France, and the city of Vilna, in the Russian Empire (today, Vilnius, Lithuania), the family immigrated to the United States in 1908, settling in New York City, where Marie attended public school.

Marie, then aged 16, spent the summer of 1915 on her own at the Atlantic Hotel in Belmar New Jersey, on the boardwalk near the beach, a well known gathering place for Jewish intelligentsia that was owned by friends of her father whom he felt would look after her. There she recalled meeting such luminaries as Sholom Aleichem, Sholom Asch, Chaim Zhitlowsky and Pinchas Rutenberg as well as her future husband Maurice Samuel. Two years later on August 31, 1917, Marie and Maurice secretly eloped, marrying at city hall in Manhattan. When they informed her father the following weekend he was furious. Though Nahum Syrkin and Maurice Samuel shared many of the same political views, the elder Syrkin thought Marie was too intelligent and beautiful for Samuel who had little means, poor prospects and had already enlisted to go off to war. He filed for and received an annulment, claiming (falsely) that Marie was not yet of age. He did permit them to be engaged and the couple maintained a long distance relationship via mail after Samuel enlisted in the US Army, which gradually cooled until Syrkin broke it off on Feb 4, 1919. (David Bodansky, 1924–2012, later became a physicist and chaired the Physics Department at the University of Washington in 1976-1984. ) Around that time Syrkin and her husband separated and then divorced. In 1925 she moved to New York City with her infant son David, Among the courses she taught at Brandeis were courses on the literature of the Holocaust (possibly the earliest such university course), and American Jewish fiction. a collection of articles that first appeared in Jewish Frontier, taking issue with Arnold J. Toynbee's antisemitic characterization of Jews representing a fossilized culture. It also featuring authors such as theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, biblical archeologist William F. Albright, diplomat Abba Eban, Mordecai Kaplan and Horace Kallen.

Works Books Your School, Your Children: A Teacher Looks at What's Wrong with Our Schools. New York: L. B. Fischer, 1944 Blessed is the Match: The Story of Jewish Resistance. New York: Knopf, 1947. Reprinted, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1976. Way of Valor: A Biography of Golda Myerson. New York: Sharon Books, 1955 Nachman Syrkin, Socialist Zionist: A Biographical Memoir / Selected Essays. New York: Herzl Press, 1961 Golda Meir: Woman with a Cause. New York: Putnam, 1963. Revised edition published as: Golda Meir: Israel's Leader, 1969 Gleanings: A Diary in Verse. Santa Barbara, CA: Rhythms Press, 1979 The State of the Jews [collection of previously published essays]. Washington, DC: New Republic Books, 1980.

Awards 1981: Solomon Bublick Award, Hebrew University of Jerusalem