Yisrael Medad spent many hours with the poet and Revisionist Zionist Uri Tzvi Greenberg (1896-1981) at Greenberg’s Ramat Gan home in the decade prior to his death. ‘He prayed wrapped in tallit and tefillin, rushing back-and-forth from wall to wall in his living room’ he recalls, ‘less praying than conducting a demanding conversation with God’. Medad rereads Greenberg’s 1929 poem Sicarii II
, with its demand for a rebel’s mindset and a revolutionary spirit, its hymn of praise to Jewish self-assertion and self-emancipation, as a resource for Jews today, inside and outside Israel, in the face of the existential Iranian threat and rising global anti-Semitism.