Chaim Nachman Bialik

Bialik becomes the national poet of the Hebrew revival, writing at a moment when Hebrew has almost no living speakers and must be stretched to carry modern emotion. Sent to document Kishinev in 1903, he writes In the City of Slaughter, which turns its fury not on the murderers but on Jewish passivity, and the poem changes the political temperature of a generation. He also compiles the Sefer HaAggadah with Ravnitzky, making the narrative material of the Talmud accessible to ordinary readers. He settles in Tel Aviv, where his home and his idea of the oneg shabbat cultural gathering become fixtures of the new Hebrew culture.