What does it take to build a nation from scratch — and what happens when the builders can’t agree on what that nation should look like? This course plunges into the fierce clashes, secret plots, and explosive debates that shaped the Jewish State: dreamers versus realists, diplomats versus fighters, and survivors grappling with an unthinkable past. We’ll meet a soldier-journalist who called on young Jews to bear arms, witness near-civil war on a burning ship, a Nazi war criminal on trial in Jerusalem, and a monk who forced an entire country to ask, “Who is a Jew?” From the founding arguments of Herzl and Ahad Ha’am to the showdowns between Begin and Ben Gurion, students will relive the battles that defined the State of Israel.