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In 1916 Buber founded the influential monthly Der Jude ("The Jew"), which he edited until 1924 and which became the central forum for practically all German-reading Jewish intellectuals. In its pages he advocated the unpopular cause of Jewish-Arab cooperation in the formation of a binational state in Palestine.

After his marriage (1901) to a non-Jewish, pro-Zionist author, Paula Winckler, who converted to Judaism, Buber took up the study of Hasidism. His Chassidischen Bücher (1927) made the legacy of this popular 18th-century eastern European Jewish pietistic movement a part of Western literature. In Hasidism Buber saw a healing power for the malaise of Judaism and mankind in an age of alienation that had shaken three vital human relationships: those between man and God, man and man, and man and nature. They can be restored, he asserted, only by man's again meeting the other person or being who stands over against him, on all three levels--the divine, human, and natural. Buber maintained that early Hasidism accomplished this encounter and that Zionism should follow its example.

In Paths in Utopia (1949) he referred to the Israeli kibbutz--a cooperative agricultural community the members of which work in a natural environment and live together in a voluntary communion--as a "bold Jewish undertaking" that proved to be "an exemplary non-failure," one example of a "utopian" socialism that works. Yet he did not ascribe ultimate success to it. His reservation stemmed from the fact that, generally, members of the kibbutz disregarded the relation between man and God, denying or doubting the existence or presence of a divine counterpart. In the interpersonal area they fulfilled God's commandment to build a just community while yet denying the divine origin of the implicit imperative. Buber as an educator tried to refute these ideological "prejudices of youth," who, he asserted, rightly criticize outworn images of God but wrongly identify them with the imageless living God himself.