Liebmann Hersch

[5] In 1891 Meyer Dovid Hersch traveled to South Africa, where he worked as a correspondent for the Hebrew press in Eastern Europe.

He and his second wife, Ita Melamed Hersch (1871–1958), moved with their family to Warsaw,[6] where Liebmann attended high school, and participated in Zionist youth activities.

[4] Influenced by the debates within the Bund about the economic and political future of the Jews in Eastern Europe, Hersch pursued research on the causes and characteristics of Jewish emigration.

He became an instructor in the department of statistics and demography in 1909,[2] and went on to complete his dissertation, which was published in French in 1913 as Le Juif errant d'aujourd'hui (The wandering Jew today).

[8] In connection with his Bundist activities, Hersch published articles on political and social issues in the Yiddish, Polish and Russian press, with a focus on emigration and the problems of Jewish nationalism.

In 1927 he published a three-part study in the Yiddish-language journal Di Tsukunft that amounted to a critique of Zionism from a statistical and demographic standpoint.

On the basis of that study he wrote his book Immigration to and Emigration from Palestine, published in Warsaw in Yiddish in 1928, and subsequently translated into French.

[10] During World War II, Hersch was active on behalf of Jews in Nazi-occupied countries, and those who had taken refuge in Switzerland, and was a representative on the American Jewish Labor Committee.