Revolutionary Yiddishland
A History of Jewish Radicalism
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
This “rich and poignant” history traces Jewish radicals from their Eastern European roots through years of hope, Nazi resistance, and beyond—“with fascinating asides on Spain and Palestine” (Noam Chomsky).
Jewish radicals manned the barricades on the avenues of Petrograd and the alleys of the Warsaw ghetto; they were in the vanguard of those resisting Franco and the Nazis. They originated in Yiddishland, a vast expanse of Eastern Europe that, before the Holocaust, ran from the Baltic Sea to the western edge of Russia and incorporated hundreds of Jewish communities with a combined population of 11 million people. Within this territory, revolutionaries arose from the Jewish misery of Eastern and Central Europe; they were raised in the fear of God and taught to respect religious tradition but were caught up in the great current of revolutionary utopian thinking. Socialists, Communists, Bundists, Zionists, Trotskyists, manual workers and intellectuals, they embodied the multifarious activity and radicalism of a Jewish working class that glimpsed the Messiah in the folds of the red flag.
Today, the world from which they came has disappeared, dismantled and destroyed by the Nazi genocide. After this irremediable break, there remain only survivors, and the work of memory for red Yiddishland. This book traces the struggles of these militants, their singular trajectories, their oscillation between great hope and doubt, their lost illusions—a red and Jewish gaze on the history of the 20th century.
“Nowadays we know more and more about the Nazi Genocide . . . we have much less knowledge about the everyday life which preceded the horror and was so brutally terminated.” —Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Despite the implied scope of the book's subtitle, Brossat and Klingberg are only interested in considering early 20th-century European Jewish leftists. Those individuals, and the movements that spawned them (such as the Bund), certainly merit study, but this analysis is a jargon-laden polemic. Neither author is trained as a historian, and they both rely on oral histories while providing little context by which to assess their reliability. Terminology will also be an obstacle for some, as when the authors broadly define communism as "the word used for politics with the ambition to establish social justice and apply egalitarian principles." Brossat and Klingberg are not bashful about stating their own perspectives, noting in their introduction that "we did not conduct our interviews as journalists, as curious bystanders, but above all as militants of the same utopia as that which took them so high and so low." This pervasive bias is a major negative; statements such as, "The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, as the Zionists never tire of repeating, leaned ever more to the side of Hitler's Germany," are gratuitous editorializing that only detracts from the authors' points.
