Tom Segev’s voluminous biography, A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion, gives new meaning to the Latin phrase – carpe diem – seize the day. That is just what David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) did when he proclaimed the independence of the State of Israel in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1948.

The now-or-never philosophy of Israel’s “founding father” is captured in the video below, which shows Ben-Gurion confidently stepping out of a Lincoln sedan and proudly saluting the waiting crowd before striding into the Tel Aviv Museum, where he will announce the fateful declaration.

In the video, we see a short, pudgy man with two protruding tufts of white hair crowning his large, balding head. In his left hand is a briefcase, presumably containing the Hebrew text of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, a document he personally rewrote the night before because he was dissatisfied with the original draft by his Zionist colleague, Moshe Shertok (Sharett).
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Ben-Gurion’s salute signaled to a skeptical world his steely resolve in the face of opposition from President Harry Truman’s top two cabinet members: Secretary of State George C. Marshall and Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal, misgivings also voiced by his more cautious Zionist comrades, as well as the threat of an imminent war with better-equipped Arab armies.

When the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) convenes its 2019 Biennial this December in Chicago, it will shine the spotlight on a city with a rich Jewish heritage.  

The city’s first congregation, Kehilath Anshe Mayriv (KAM, and known today as KAM Isaiah Israel) established in 1847, was a founding member of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the URJ), and four of its rabbis have served as president of the Reform Movement’s rabbinical arm, the Central Conference of American Rabbis.

By 1930, the Chicago’s Jewish population of 275,000 was surpassed in number only by New York City and Warsaw, Poland. Among the many illustrious Jews with a strong Chicago connection were Sears, Roebuck executive and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, world champion boxer Barney Ross, “King of Swing” band leader Benny Goodman, Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, advice columnist Esther Lederer a.k.a. Ann Landers, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel, and Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow.
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No author has portrayed Jewish life in Chicago during the two decades before WWII better than has its native son, journalist-turned-novelist Meyer Levin (1905-1981). His autobiographical narrative, The Old Bunch (1937), follows the lives of 19 young Chicago Jews – 11 boys and eight girls – beginning with their high school graduations in 1921 and concluding with the Chicago World’s Fair in 1934.