This page is subject to the extended confirmed restriction related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.Judah Leon Magnes (Hebrew: יהודה לייב מאגנס; July 5, 1877 – October 27, 1948) was a prominent Reform rabbi in both the United States of America and Mandatory Palestine.

He is best remembered as a leader in the pacifist movement of the World War I period, his advocacy of a binational Jewish-Arab state in Palestine, and as one of the most widely recognized voices of 20th century American Reform Judaism.

By 1900 there were nearly a million Jews, most coming from what is now Poland, Hungary, Romania, Belarus and Ukraine, making it the largest Jewish population outside of Europe and the Russian Empire.

On 11 October 1908 he was chairman of a conference of Jewish organisations, the invitations to which, in English and Yiddish, had also been signed by labour leader Joseph Barondess and Judge Otto A. Rosalsky, amongst others.

The conference authorised the formation of a representative community, the Kehillah, and gave Magnes the power to appoint an executive committee.

"[13] The committee proceeded to set up a series of boards, or bureaus: Education (1910), Social Morals (1912); Industry (1914); and Philanthropic Research (1916).

Funding was dependent on wealthy New York Jews such as Jacob Schiff, Felix M. Warburg and Louis Marshall who made an endowment for girls' education.

[16] At the end of 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, Magnes became involved in collecting funds for the Jewish population in Palestine.

The following year, a greater crisis arose with the war on the Eastern Front, devastating the Jews of the Pale of Settlement.

In December 1915, a fund-raising effort was launched at the Carnegie Hall, at which he delivered an emotional appeal which raised a million dollars in donations.

According to Israeli professor Arthur A. Goren, he considered himself a follower of Mahatma Gandhi and the prophet Jeremiah, and opposed all forms of nationalism by military force.

[21] Following the United States' entry into the war in Europe in the spring of 1917, Magnes switched all his attention to campaigning against it.

People such Eugene Debs who was sentenced to ten years in prison for his activities; Norman Thomas; Roger Nash Baldwin; Scott Nearing; Morris Hillquit, who took 22% of the vote in New York's Mayoral elections on an anti-war platform; and Oswald Garrison Villard.

Most of these men were involved in what became the People's Council of America for Democracy and the Terms of Peace with Magnes its first chairman.

[23] Despite coming from a wealthy background—by 1920 he had become financially independent—Magnes reacted to the Russian Revolution with enthusiasm; in 1921 he was the spokesman at Philadelphia for the Society for Medical Relief to Soviet Russia.

[26] In both America and Palestine, Magnes played a key role in founding the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1918 along with Albert Einstein and Chaim Weizmann.

However, the three did not get along, and when, in 1928, Magnes, who was initially responsible only for the university's finances and administrative staff, had his authority extended to academic and professional matters, Einstein resigned from the Board of Governors.

Einstein wrote: The bad thing about the business was that the good Felix Warburg, thanks to his financial authority ensured that the incapable Magnes was made director of the Institute, a failed American rabbi, who, through his dilettantish enterprises had become uncomfortable to his family in America, who very much hoped to dispatch him honorably to some exotic place.

[28] Magnes believed that the university was the ideal place for Jewish and Arab cooperation, and worked tirelessly to advance this goal.

[29] Magnes dedicated the rest of his life to reconciliation with the local Arabs; he particularly objected to the concept of a specifically Jewish state.

[30] In a speech given at the reopening of the university following the 1929 riots Magnes was heckled by members of the audience for speaking of the need for Jews and Arabs to find ways to live and work together.

[31] In late 1937, Magnes welcomed the Hyamson-Newcombe proposal for the creation of an independent Palestinian state with all citizens having equal rights and each community having autonomy, writing that it offered the 'portals to an agreement' between Jews and Arabs in Palestine.

Magnes's enthusiasm for the Newcombe-Hyamson proposal can be explained by his commitment to Arab-Jewish cooperation, a binational state and his acknowledgement of the importance of demographic balance for Arab negotiators.

With partition a new Balkan is made [..] New York Times, July 18, 1937.With increasing persecution of European Jews, the outbreak of World War II and continuing violence in Mandate Palestine, Magnes realized that his vision of a voluntary negotiated treaty between Arabs and Jews had become politically impossible.

In an article in January 1942 in Foreign Affairs he suggested a joint British-American initiative to prevent the division of Mandate Palestine.

The Biltmore Conference in May that year caused Magnes and others to break from the Zionist mainstream's revised demand for a "Jewish Commonwealth".

According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, the Hadassah medical convoy massacre of April 13, 1948, was "in effect the final nail in the coffin of Magnes' binationalism.

At the funerals of the victims, eighteen staff members from Hebrew University signed a petition protesting Magnes' view.

[43] Just before his death, he withdrew from the leadership of American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a welfare organization he had helped establish.

...One of the most distinguished rabbis of our age, a son of the Hebrew Union College, a former rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, New York, the founder and first chancellor of the Hebrew University, the leader of the movement for good will between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, a man of prophetic stature by whose life and works the traditions of the rabbinate, as well as the spiritual traditions of all mankind were enriched.