Glendale, California.

What a surreal experience yesterday.

Sitting to my right the Consul General Sam Grundwerg, of the Israeli Consulate of Los Angeles. To my left, Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, Director at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. And to Yitzhok’s left, the Ambassador of Korea and the President of Biola University.

All of us were given the unique opportunity to speak of the inspiring life of William Blackstone whose mobilization of Christian support for a Jewish national homeland as early as 1891, five years before the publication of Theodore Herzl’s The Jewish State in 1897, motivated Jewish businessman Nathan Straus and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandies, leaders of the American Zionist movement, to call Blackstone the “Father of Zionism.”

As I said, it was surreal.