HA-ME'ORER

HA-ME'ORER (Heb. הַמְּעוֹרֵר; "the Awakener"), a Hebrew monthly published in London in 1906–07 and edited by J.Ḥ. *Brenner. Ha-Me'orer began publication after the failure of the Russian revolution of 1905. While living in London, Brenner was involved in the Jewish and general labor movements there. Through this monthly, dominated by his sharp and nonconformist thinking, Brenner hoped to establish a Hebrew center in England at a time when there were few Hebrew papers in Russia. He was severely critical of complacency in Hebrew literature, which resisted original thought, and of the Jewish labor movement in Russia, which promoted Yiddish instead of Hebrew. In particular, Brenner denounced what he considered hollow verbiage current in the Jewish workers' movement on the one hand, and in the Zionist movement and its literature on the other.

Ha-Me'orer was the periodical in which Brenner first crystallized the approach characterizing the periodicals he later edited. His reactions to current affairs and to literature were a model of original, non-conventional thinking. In addition to printing stories and plays of his own and others, he also published poems, essays, and translations of Ibsen, Wilde, and Maeterlinck. Contributors to Ha-Me'orer were authors, old and young, who appreciated the editor's attempts to maintain a Hebrew paper single-handedly. After appearing for less than two years, however, the paper could no longer maintain itself and ceased publication. Ha-Me'orer greatly influenced young Jews and particularly the generation of the Second Aliyah.

bibliography:

Kressel, Leksikon, 1 (1965), 369–72; idem, in: La-Merḥav (Sept. 26, 1969). add. bibliography: Y. Bakon, Brenner in London (Hebrew, 1990).

[Getzel Kressel]