Before Golda: Manya Shochat

"Manya Shochat was a truly unusual woman, a figure of extreme complexity who might have come out of a nineteenth-century Russian novel. In her life's story we find a full enactment -- rare in one person -- of the main qualities, some of them contradictory, which played such a prominent role in the history of Zionism. She was incredibly tough and unbelievably charitable; sentimental and fearless; a fanatic Zionist and a fanatic socialist; a co-founder of Ha'shomer (an armed organization of s...