The Jewish author and philosopher Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) was an influential leader of English Jewry and a Zionist activist.

Israel Zangwill was born in London. His family, Russian Jews, lived in London's east side in the Jewish quarter of White-chapel. After receiving both an English and a Jewish education, he studied philosophy, history, and the sciences at the University of London. At the same time he taught at the Free Jewish School of London. Having left teaching for a career in journalism, he generated much popular interest as a writer and a literary editor. Even in his first articles he showed a keen sensitivity to tragic and comic themes alike and succeeded in combining powers of realistic description with a fertile imagination.

Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto was published in 1892. The work had considerable impact in the non-Jewish world, giving the English reader a jarring glimpse of the...