Ber Borochov

Ber Borochov was born in 1881 in Zolotonosha and grew up in Poltava, in today's Ukraine. He became the leading theorist of Poale Zion, the Marxist Zionist workers' party. In essays such as "Our Platform" (1906) he argued that exile had pushed Jews out of agriculture and industry and into commerce and the professions, an "inverted pyramid". Without a territory of their own, Jewish workers could never wage a normal class struggle. The natural course of history, he wrote, would carry Jewish migration to the Land of Israel.

Borochov was also a pioneer of Yiddish linguistics, publishing "The Tasks of Yiddish Philology" in 1913. He spent the war years in the United States, returned to Russia after the 1917 revolution, and died of pneumonia in Kyiv in December 1917, aged 36. His ideas shaped Labor Zionism, the Histadrut and the left-wing kibbutz movements. In 1963 his remains were reburied at the Kinneret cemetery.