The “renaissance generation,” as the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik termed it, produced a colorful pantheon of personalities – including authors, poets, teachers, pioneers, and activists who were products of reading and who produced books as trees produce leaves. The Second Aliyah (wave of immigration of Zionists), which after many incarnations and augmentations would beget the State of Israel and was a manifestation, as it were, of Bialik's poetry, used the term renaissance a great deal and saw itself as a practical revival movement. Secular Zionism at large grew accustomed to using the term Jewish renaissance to describe its endeavors.

One who speaks of Ben-Gurion has to note that his long life included different periods with different emphases and priorities. I cannot discuss all of them in this monograph. I will try to examine some of the issues that occupied him and mention several sobriquets that he adopted or that others proposed in order to define his motives and deeds.