Not Sold on Szold

“Labors of Love: The Life and Legacy of Henrietta Szold” the recent documentary on the life of iconic Zionist, Henrietta Szold veers away from an objective focus on her extraordinary accomplishments into political subjectivism and what, has been termed “suicidal empathy” by writer Gad Saad.

The director, Abby Ginzberg is the granddaughter of Louis Ginzberg who broke Szold’s heart. He is not a sympathetic figure. Surely in their years of close friendship, it must have occurred to him that she looked at him with more than academic interest as he continued to make use of her talents, contacts, devotion, etc. The documentary skips over the reality of Jewish and Arab life in pre-Independence Palestine and ignores the facts that the Arabs were Jordanians, that many attacked and killed Jewish settlers, the 1929 Hebron massacre, that some Arab leaders welcomed Jewish settlement, that not all Arabs were Muslim! Ginzberg tries to make history fit her modern day progressivism. She features anti-Zionist “experts” one of whom said the Balfour Declaration denied Arab rights. Huh? The very language of the Balfour recognized the rights of “non-Jewish” Palestinians.

One of the things that most annoyed me was Ginzberg hugging the Szold grave caretaker in the Mount of Olives cemetery. I’ve been told (I missed it) that a caption in the frame identified the location as “East Jerusalem,” a fictive area that Palestinians consider the capital of their future state. (Get it?) He appears to be a nice man but he does not represent the modern terrorist trained from birth to hate and kill Jews. (The documentary also failed to mention that the Jordanians paved over Szold’s grave and it took Israeli annexation of the area after the 1967 war to find and rebuild it!)

The interaction reminded me of the woman living in a border town on 10/7 who was well known for driving Gazans to and from Israeli hospitals.

The invaders killed her.

Dear Miss Ginzberg. The terrorists would have killed Henrietta Szold, too.