Nearly 125 years after the First Zionist Congress in August 1897, Theodor Herzl remains Israel’s iconic founder. Herzl was not the first to say that “the Jews are a people,” or that this harassed, belittled, detested, oppressed people needed a state in their homeland. But he said it in the right way at the right time. His efforts solidified the Zionist idea and launched the Zionist movement, which came to fruition half a century later, in 1948, with the founding of the State of Israel. Even as he starts enjoying some successes, the angel of death keeps taunting Herzl. His diaries become filled with premonitions of impending doom – and details about his failing health – only making him more desperate for quick success. Following the horrific Kishinev pogroms in 1903, he seeks a temporary refuge and presents the so-called “Uganda Plan” to the Sixth Zionist Congress. He then watches in horror as the Eastern European Jews turn on him. His affirmation in Hebrew as the Congress ends, that “if I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning,” avoids a rupture, but the blow-up drains him. His heart gives out in 1904, a little more than a decade after his Zionist work began. This volume, tracking his leadership, ends with a new translation of his utopian novel Altneuland (Old New Land) which cleverly catches Herzl’s Zionist dance between the old and the new, between what is and what can be, between the realities we work with and the dreams we refuse to abandon.