"If the Jews wish to become a nation of 'Jewish Culture, '" Eliezer Ben-Yehuda wrote in 1904, "they must first become truly a nation." Throughout the subsequent decade, Ben-Yehuda and other Zionist activists in Palestine attempted to transform the small, divided, economically depressed, and demographically declining Yishuv -- the pre-state Jewish community -- into the foundation of a modern nation. In this book, Arieh Bruce Saposnik tells the story of this transformation.

As Saposnik shows, these activists did not attempt to rewrite Jewish culture simply by uprooting and transplanting...