Jewish Communist Research Articles

The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland. By Jaff Schatz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. x, 408 pp. Bibliography. Index. Hard bound

The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland. By Jaff Schatz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. x, 408 pp. Bibliography. Index. Hard bound

Gomulka's ‘Rightist-Nationalist Deviation,’ The Postwar Jewish Communists, and the Stalinist Reaction in Poland, 1945-1950

The first years of Communist rule in Poland profoundly shaped the 45 year political experience of the country until the 1989 democratic breakthrough. These formative years encompassed such historic developments as postwar reconstruction and central economic planning, the emergence of new and the disappearance of old political parties, the heretical notion of a Polish road to socialism but also the advent of high Stalinism. Even with the redrawing of Poland's postwar boundaries and with increasing Communist hegemony over political life, the period between 1945 and 1948 was characterized by considerably more political and ethnic heterogeneity than the decades that followed. A significant and, ultimately, controversial role in the shaping of postwar Poland - in its rebuilding, in its economic program, political configuration, national security organization, and in its minorities policies - was played by Jewish Communists.

The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland (review)

The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland (review)

The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland.

The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland.

The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland

The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland

Reviews

Encyclopaedic Account of Soviet Middle East Policy. Robert O. Freedman, Moscow and the Middle East: Soviet Policy Since the Invasion of Afghanistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 438pp. $59.50 hardcover, $16.95 paperback. Understanding the Jews of Eastern Europe Heiko Haumann, Geschichte der Ostjuden, 1st edition. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1990. 3rd ed., 1992. 213pp. Bibl. Index. DM14.18. On the Road to Self‐Destruction Henry R. Huttenbach (ed.), Soviet Nationality Policies: Ruling Ethnic Groups in the USSR. London: Mansell, 1990. xvi+302pp. Ind. £35.00 hardcover. On the Eve of the Holocaust. Ben‐Cion. Pinchuk. Shtetl Jews under Soviet Rule: Eastern Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. viii+186pp. Bibl. Index. (Jewish Society and Culture). £30.00. ’Rocking a Dead Baby’: The Trauma of a Generation Jaff Schatz, The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Generation of Jewish Communists of Poland. Lund: Lund University, Department of Sociology, 1989. 428pp. Bibl.

The generation: the rise and fall of the Jewish communists of Poland

Revolutionaries and rebels, shoemakers and tailors, refugees, soldiers, intellectuals, and apparatchiks. They were the extraordinary generation of Polish-Jewish Communiststhe last true Communists, as some of them say today. With pathos and deeply informed insight, Jaff Schatz relates the life story of the Jews who joined the Polish Communist Party in the late 1920s and early 1930s, only to become its victims thirty years later. Schatz draws on archival research and interviews with forty-three surviving members of this generation that gave up everything but their dream of a new world order. He frames the personal drama of their rise and fall with important questions about the interaction of biography and history, showing how the lives of The Generation uniquely concentrate the recent history of East-Central Europe.

Jaff Schatz. The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. x, 408 pp. $39.95.

Jaff Schatz. The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. x, 408 pp. $39.95.

The British communist party's national Jewish committee and the fight against anti‐Semitism during the Second World War.

The Second World War saw an upsurge of anti‐Semitic activity in Great Britain. This provided further opportunity for the Jewish Communist movement, centred mainly in London's East End, to assume a political and ideological presence within the Anglo‐Jewish community. The Jewish Communists fought against the internment of Jewish aliens and charges that Jews controlled the black market. They organized demonstrations against the 1943 release from detention of Sir Oswald Mosley. The National Jewish Committee of the party developed theoretical positions on Jews and Fascism. This intense activity culminated in a number of electoral breakthroughs by the CPGB in Stepney in 1945–1946.

Russian Orthodox‐Jewish relations: A literary review

... I should express my bewilderment at the anti-Semitic feeling which exists in several contemporary Russian nationalist circles in the Soviet Union. I would have thought that when they talk about slander suffered by the Russian people, they would understand the even greater slander borne by the Jewish people with the enforced substitution of the original Jewish culture by the Yevsektsii I •.. Even worse, if the Russian identity was destroyed by communists and komsomol' members of all nationalities, those who destroyed the Jewish identity were exclusively Jewish communists, that is to say, Jewish traitors, and this must have led to even greater demoralisation among the Jewish people. But amazingly, the vast majority of Russian nationalists take no account of the tragedy of the Jewish people: instead of mutual sympathy between these two persecuted peoples, unhappily we see more often mutual antipathy and distrust. 2

At the end of the road

The aim of this article is to analyze the history and identity changes of a particular ethnopolitical generation – the former Jewish communists of Poland. The members of the group began their lives in Poland between the World Wars, they survived the Second World War as refugees in the Soviet Union&&after the war they rebuilt their lives in Poland&&during the years 1969–1972 they started a new life in Sweden. The analysis will be guided by the following questions: What are the repercussions of the group’s social and political experiences on its ethnic identity? What is the nature of changes that have taken place in its ethnic identity? What is the present state of the ethnic identity of the group? Which factors have influenced and shaped it?

‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and Russo‐German relations in 1933: A documentary note

(1971). ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and Russo‐German relations in 1933: A documentary note. Soviet Jewish Affairs: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 112-118.

REVIEW: Ester Reiter, "A Future Without Hate or Need: The Promise of the Jewish Left in Canada"; Matthew B. Hoffman & Henry F. Srebrenik, eds., "A Vanished Ideology: Essays on the Jewish Communist Movement in the English-Speaking World in the 20th Century

REVIEW: Ester Reiter, "A Future Without Hate or Need: The Promise of the Jewish Left in Canada"; Matthew B. Hoffman & Henry F. Srebrenik, eds., "A Vanished Ideology: Essays on the Jewish Communist Movement in the English-Speaking World in the 20th Century