CODA

Not a lot of people knew just how the Vietnam War had “shattered the ideals of Hans.”² In the 1950s his public persona became increasingly that of an uncritical Cold War conformist, and the one realm in which he could convincingly see himself as an independent, nonconformist thinker, swimming against the tide, was Jewish politics. In 1908 — at the beginning of the story told in this book — it was Zionism that made Kohn for the first time aware of and accountable to the power of nations and nationalism in his own life. Through Zionism, nationalism became his key to understanding