Paula ben gurion biography of michael
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David Ben-Gurion
Prime Minister of Israel (1948–1953; 1955–1963)
"Ben Gurion" redirects here. For other uses, see Ben Gurion (disambiguation).
"David Gruen" redirects here. For the Australian statistician and mathematician, see David Gruen (economist).
This page is subject to the extended confirmed restriction related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
David Ben-Gurion (ben GOOR-ee-ən; Hebrew: דָּוִד בֶּן־גּוּרִיּוֹן[daˈvidbenɡuʁˈjon]ⓘ; born David Grün; 16 October 1886 – 1 December 1973) was the primary national founder and first prime minister of the State of Israel. As head of the Jewish Agency from 1935, and later president of the Jewish Agency Executive, he was the de facto leader of the Jewish community in Palestine, and largely led the movement for an independent Jewish state in Mandatory Palestine.
Born in Płońsk, then part of församling Poland, to Polish Jewish parents, he immigrated to the Palestine region of the Ottoman Empire in 1906. Adopting the name
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A person’s life is a puzzle; a good biography an attempt to solve it. Like the moon, there is a bright side to every life, there for all to see; but also a dark side, crawling with secrets, hidden even from the person, beyond their self-awareness. The hidden forces of this dark side often drive a person’s conduct, and thus a biographer’s job must go beyond simply recounting the protagonist’s deeds and misdeeds. A biography should be a deeper venture, a more rigorous attempt to discover the dark side of the protagonist’s story, in order to shed light on the connections between the concealed and revealed aspects of the life in question.
Every great piece of art is infinite. When the gods notes of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony fade out, the deeply moved listener is drawn back to its opening movement—and unwittingly finds oneself listening once again to the whole piece, from beginning to end. When the wave of sound dies away once again, the listener is left with an unanswerable question
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‘A Knack for Handling Power’
Clarissa Eden, the widow of Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill’s niece, once asked my late wife, Edna, and me if we had an idea for someone capable of writing her husband’s biography. “What kind of biography do you have in mind?” Edna asked. “I want a big fat book that includes everything,” she said. “I don’t mind if it makes for boring reading, but I want everything in it, so that future historians could use this book as a reliable source book and make their own judgment about my husband’s achievements and failures.” The idea was clear: it is for our generation to report accurately and for future generations to judge soundly.
Anita Shapira is the author of a long, rich, and engaging biography of the Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson, who died in Jerusalem in 1944 and was arguably the only true friend David Ben-Gurion ever had in his life. Now she writes about Ben-Gurion himself—a