My wife just dug out a few of her grandparents’ books from storage. They were refugees from Nazi Germany who came to the US in the mid-1930s. One of the books is an original edition of A Palestine Picture Book, published by Schocken in 1947, featuring photographs by Jakob Rosner for the Jewish National Fund. The photographs are stunning, but it’s the text that caught my attention. From the Preface: It is barely forty years since the large-scale Jewish colonization of Palestine was begun. Despite natural and political handicaps, Jewish colonization, once begun, continued.” From chapter 1: Long a barren waste, it has been transformed by Jewish settlers into a place of fertile fields and green gardens in a generation’s […]