Alexander Pomerantz (1901–1965), the protagonist of this article, played a central role among the proletarian Yiddish writers in the United States. In 1932-35, he lived in Kyiv, where he defended a dissertation at the Institute of Proletarian Jewish Culture. In 1951, after breaking his links with the American Yiddish communist daily Morgn-Frayhayt, he claimed of always being the same as in his youth: an alumnus of the legendary Lithuanian Mir Yeshiva, and a Zionist, turning to communism because of its promise of “liberation for people and the world.” Pomerantz sought to stress his distinctiveness as a literary scholar and critic who, like the Soviet Yiddish writers murdered under Stalinist rule, remained a devotee of Marx and Lenin. In other words, he perceived himself not as an intellectual who for a long time stood in the grip of a flawed ideology, but as a victim whose ideological sufferings were inflicted on him by unscrupulous Soviet and American Stalinists. The Pomerantz case highlights a specifically “Jewish reasoning” for abandoning the pro-Soviet circles. His departure took place five years before 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev’s explosive anti-Stalinist “secret speech” precipitated a broad process of ideological reckoning in the communist camp.

This article examines the global travel that Cedric Belfrage took during the 1930s, and the political commitments he articulated as he observed the world around him. Exposure to worlds beyond their immediate surroundings was an experience central to the intellectual and political development of leftist thinkers in the interwar decades, Belfrage included. Born into London’s “gentleman class,” Cedric Belfrage (1904–1990) suffocated in the insularity of his elite upbringing and despaired of becoming a banker or a functionary in one of Britain’s colonies, careers appropriate for his class. Instead, he became a journalist who covered the emerging movie industry, a somewhat less reputable occupation. In 1934, fed up with his class’s complacency toward those below them at home and abroad, he traveled through the globe, documenting the tumult and his class’s indifference to it in an anti-imperialist travelogue Away from it All.

Angela Davis’s 1972 visit to the Soviet Union, following her high-profile arrest and trial, became a symbolic event shaped by Cold War geopolitics and state-sponsored narratives. This article critically examines that visit through two lenses: the official account and Davis’s personal writings. It explores how both narratives – Soviet and Davis’s – oversimplify or omit key dimensions: Davis’s radical politics and the lived experiences of marginalized Eurasian women. By analyzing Davis’s encounter with Uzbek woman Naima Makhmudova, the article highlights the tensions between state-orchestrated solidarity and genuine transnational connection. It argues for a reengagement with Davis’s intellectual legacy that foregrounds feminist, anti-imperialist solidarity rooted in local voices and shared resistance.

During the New Deal period, the “United Front” movement spearheaded by the American Communist Party reinterpreted the notion of “the people”, infusing it with democratic principles. This initiative contested racial divisions, actively engaged the populace, and extended support to Black individuals ensnared in a discriminatory criminal justice system. Concurrently, it advocated for a broader conception of “Americanism”, highlighting the significance of ethnic and racial diversity as a source of pride and honor within American society. Furthermore, the movement galvanized the masses to advocate for labor rights and civil liberties. The cultural framework of the “United Front” movement fostered a more inclusive understanding of “Americanism” and introduced a more radical ethos into “New Deal liberalism”.

Angela Davis is known today as a feminist and advocate against mass incarceration. The trial, People of California vs. Angela Davis, may have been long forgotten in the United States, but the same cannot be said for Germany. In former East Germany, the trial embodies her recognition and current legacy because of State-sponsored documentary and fictional film. In examining the newsreel of East Germany, Augenzeuge (Eyewitness), short form documentary, like Für Angela (For Angela), and the children’s film Willy, Wally, Werner, und das Schweinchen Wurstel fahren zu den Westfeltspielen (Willy, Wally, Werner and the Little Pig Wurstel Travel to the World Youth Festival) my paper argues for possibilities of agency through State sponsored media. Because the GDR’s documentaries were state sponsored, they are often dismissed as propaganda. However, these short form documentaries tell us about East Germans narratives of Davis and their participation in her campaigns. With this complexity in mind, I analyze documentaries of East German solidarity with Angela Davis with an eye to the possibility of personal and meaningful engagement.

With good reason, Jesús Colón – grassroots organizer, Socialist-then Communist, teacher, candidate, writer, poet – has garnered substantial historical interest for students of Puerto Rican life in New York, nourishing retrospectives on U.S. Communists and anti-racism. An Afro-Puerto Rican, he came to the mainland as a teenaged stowaway at the end of World War I. Colón worked as dock laborer, cigar-maker, and postal worker. Along with his wife Concha, older brother Joaquín, and cousin Ramón, he furthered working-class Puerto Rican organizations. The largest of these was the Cervantes Fraternal Society of the International Workers Order (IWO), which is the central focus of the current article. The Communist-led IWO linked healthcare, civil rights, anti-colonialism, and anti-fascism. Drawing thousands of laborers, Colón facilitated Puerto Rican, as well as Cuban and Mexican, IWO lodges during the 1930s and 1940s. Based primarily on the Colón Collection at the Center for Brooklyn History and the Colón Papers at Hunter College, the article details Jesús Colón’s leading role in the Cervantes Society and the IWO until the latter was driven out of existence by McCarthyism in the early 1950s. In so doing, it traces the work of the Communist Party USA among Puerto Ricans in particular: part and parcel of the Party’s emphasis on solidarity.

This article explores the ways in which Angela Davis’s celebrity in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s coincided with the USSR’s shifting discourses around communism, especially the emphasis on “developed socialism” that defined the so-called stagnation era under Brezhnev. As Soviet leadership sought to bolster public investment in stabilizing communism, the image of an imprisoned Davis—member of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) and a victim of American capitalism, racism, and sexism—offered an opportune symbol around which they could sympathize and organize. I focus in particular on how Soviet engagement with the “Free Angela Davis” movement, as evidenced by the letters and objects in the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis (NUCFAD) archive, further constructed a mythology around Davis that could reflect evolving cultural narratives around Soviet belonging and Soviet personhood. This depiction of Davis, I argue, produced desirable ways of re-envisioning communism that countered, at least symbolically, the rigid authoritarianism of Stalinism, but detracted from (or at least attempted to) present internal crises, namely the reliance on capitalism and colonialism in the efforts toward developed socialism.

During the 1930s and 1940s, three unified Communist front organizations were established under the auspices of the Communist Party of the United States of America: The National Negro Congress, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. The strategies employed by the National Negro Congress not only contributed significantly to the civil rights movement of the 1960s but also established a framework for collaboration among interracial civil rights organizations. The Southern Negro Youth Congress fostered a tradition of activism among Black youth, particularly in Birmingham, Alabama, thereby creating a robust foundation for the subsequent civil rights movement and cultivating numerous civil rights leaders who emerged in the 1960s. Members of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare were staunch supporters of the civil rights movement during the 1960s, and its successor organization, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, provided both financial assistance to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and guidance on civil rights principles. Collectively, these three Communist front organizations exerted a significant influence on the civil rights movement in the United States post-1960s, and their activities served as a vital origin for the contemporary American civil rights movement.