The Tip of the Yod

Judah (Yehudah) Leib Gordon, the most renowned Hebrew-language poet of the nineteenth century, was born and educated in Vilna. After working as a teacher, he moved to St. Petersburg in 1872 to serve as secretary of the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia. A proponent of Jewish modernization and enhanced status for women, he was denounced for radicalism and briefly imprisoned. Once exonerated, he became the editor of the Hebrew paper Ha-melits, continuing to critique Orthodoxy through his writing. Though his mother tongue was Yiddish, he advocated for Jewish acceptance of Hebrew and Russian as a means of Jewish cultural rebirth and emancipation.