Jewish Labor Research Articles

HERE-NESS, THERE-NESS, AND EVERYWHERE-NESS: THE JEWISH LABOUR BUND AND THE QUESTION OF ISRAEL, 1944–1955

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jews around the world intensified their call for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The Jewish Labour Bund, an Eastern European Jewish socialist party, had been, throughout its existence vehemently anti-Zionist, advocating instead its notion of doikayt (literally “here-ness”), which claimed that Jews should focus on building viable communities in any place in which they lived. This article will examine the way the movement remained steadfast in its opposition to Jewish statehood in the aftermath of the Holocaust and even in the wake Israel's establishment in 1948, and it will chart the process by which the Bund embraced Israel as quickly in 1955, looking at the rise of a Bund organization in Israel. I will argue that the Bund's position was neither desperate nor naïve. It was grounded in the Bundists' traditional enmity towards Zionism, and reflected their faith in a universalist answer to the problem of Jewish survival. This story complicates contemporary understandings of postwar Jewish and European history, and sheds new light on notions of diaspora and experiences of displacement.

'Footprints in the Concrete': A Study of the Chemin des Juifs (Jews' Road), Jewish Slave Labour Camps, and Related Sites, in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France

The concepts of 'dissonant heritage' and 'minority' heritage have become of particular importance in heritage management. Jewish heritage, both nationally and internationally, is a prime example of a 'dissonant' minority heritage. In the English and European context, those working with Jewish heritage often typify it as a 'hidden' or 'neglected' heritage' and report that it is especially prone to misinterpretation, misuse, physical degradation, or loss. This is even more the case with sites associated with the Shoah or Holocaust whose preservation as 'hot' or 'difficult' heritage poses inevitably contentious internal and external issues for the host country. This article highlights the heritage and landscape of the Holocaust in the Nord-Pas-deCalais region of Northern France where an archaeology of lost or forgotten concentration camps housing Jewish labourers working on the concrete constructions of the Atlantic Wall vividly commemorates both victim and perpetrator. To date, these remains of the Holocaust have never been fully identified, mapped, recorded, or examined archaeologically. Using a newly released resource of Allied aerial photographs — TARA — in combination with Google Earth™ and field research, an attempt is made to identify the camps and, potentially, the sites of mass graves. The article concludes with an appeal to carry out more archaeological study of these sites so that they can be appropriately memorialized, conserved, and used in historical and ethical education.

La Scuola di Francoforte in esilio: storia di un'inchiesta sull'antisemitismo nella classe operaia americana

- Between July and December 1944 the Institute for social research of Columbia University made known the results of a survey on anti-Semitism in the American working class carried out by the Jewish Labor Committee of New York. The results of the research confirmed the rooting of a few stereotypes and prejudices on Jews in some specific segments of the American working world: more widespread among "blue collars" rather than "white collars" and among the white population rather than the black. This form of anti-Semitism involved, paradoxically, also the workers of factories producing weapons to fight against the Third Reich. A form of anti-Semitism which did not stop with the end of World War II but turned, using the same mechanisms analyzed by migrant German sociologists, into a discrimination against communist militants.Parole chiave: Scuola di Francoforte, esilio, classe operaia, antisemitismo, razzismo, comunismo School of Frankfurt, exile, anti-Semitism, working class, racism, communism

The Minsk Ghetto 1941–1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism (review)

Reviewed by: The Minsk Ghetto 1941–1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism Jennifer L. Foray The Minsk Ghetto 1941–1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism, by Barbara Epstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. 351 pp. $39.95. Contrary to its title, The Minsk Ghetto 1941–1943 does not focus solely upon the clandestine activities undertaken within the borders of the Jewish ghetto established by Byelorussia's German occupiers in 1941. Rather, Epstein uses the testimonies of former resisters, both Jewish and Byelorussian, to examine the inner workings of the extensive underground network in wartime Minsk. In the process, Epstein presents a detailed portrait of a nation whose pre-war history and wartime trajectory were both comparable to and sharply divergent from those of its more well-studied neighbors. Largely isolated from developments occurring elsewhere on the continent, these self-declared "Soviet citizens" in the Byelorussian capital forged their own path through the difficult terrain of German occupation. For the Jews of Minsk, and, indeed, for countless Byelorussians, this path led from the city to the partisan units in the nearby forests. The first few chapters of this work explore the unique history of Minsk in comparison to that of other Eastern European cities with large Jewish populations. Of critical significance was the fact that, for two decades before the war, Minsk was under Soviet rule. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Byelorussian political parties had elected to join the new Russian federation, thus creating the Soviet Socialist Republic of Byelorussia. Largely underdeveloped and lacking a wealthy peasantry, Byelorussia was not subjected to the same violent collectivization program as was most notably implemented in nearby Ukraine. On the contrary, the interwar period saw modernization, industrialization, and the expansion of education, which helped to promote a fairly positive impression of Soviet rule. Most importantly for the nation's Jewish citizens, these developments were accompanied by the rise of a new Byelorussian-Soviet identity, which, according to Epstein, "provided an indigenous basis for an ethnically inclusive understanding of patriotism" (p. 75). Especially in the capital city of Minsk, Soviet rule had fostered "Jewish integration and had promoted an ideology of internationalism that had a particular influence on young people, leading many to regard interethnic relationships with pride" [End Page 168] (p. 31). These relationships forged under the mantle of Soviet internationalism constituted the backbone of wartime resistance in this occupied city. On June 22, 1941, German forces commenced the invasion of the Soviet Union. Within a week, Byelorussia found itself under German rule, and, for the next three years, Minsk would serve as the capital of Reichskommissariat Ostland, which included Byelorussia, the Baltic nations, and parts of Poland. In early August 1941, the city's approximately 71,000 Jewish residents were forced into the old Jewish area in the northwestern sector of the city. The population of the ghetto soon swelled to more than 100,000, as Jews from surrounding areas were brought to Minsk following the destruction of their towns and villages. Here, they would be subjected to one deadly attack after another. In November 1941, for example, at least 12,000 Jews—mostly children, the elderly, and others exempted from labor details—were removed from the ghetto and brought to an execution site outside of the city, where they were all killed. With each successive action, the Germans constricted the borders of the ghetto and tightened the noose around its remaining inhabitants until finally "liquidating" the ghetto in October 1943. As in other occupied countries, the Germans mandated the creation of a Jewish Council, or Judenrat, shortly after their arrival in Minsk. However, Ilya Mushkin, the first head of this Jewish Council, was hardly the compliant, malleable leader the Germans had expected him to be: from the time of his appointment in July 1941 until his disappearance and presumed death in February 1942, Mushkin doubled as one of the leaders of the Jewish underground. In fact, the three leading institutions of the ghetto, namely, the Jewish Council, the Jewish Labor Exchange, and the Jewish Hospital, all served as important centers of ghetto resistance. Mushkin and his colleagues at these institutions fostered active cooperation between the ghetto resistance and the Minsk...

The Bund Abroad in the Postwar Jewish World

The Jewish Labor Bund in Poland was destroyed during the Holocaust, and efforts to resurrect the shattered party on Polish soil were thwarted with the advent of communism in 1949. With several thousand bundists now dispersed to all corners of the globe, the International Jewish Labor Bund was established in 1947, the first time in the Bund’s 50-year history that it had organized across geographic borders. This article examines the circumstances surrounding the Bund’s decision to restructure and how this new movement functioned as a transnational network of bundist groups in over a dozen countries. It looks at the development of and interaction between local Bund organizations and considers the role that the movement’s World Coordinating Committee played in the life of those organizations.

National-Cultural Autonomy and 'Neutralism': Vladimir Medem's Marxist Analysis of the National Question, 1903-1920.

This article examines the views of Vladimir Medem (1879-1923) —a major leader and theorist of the Jewish Labour Bund in Tsarist Russia and, after 1918, in independent Poland— on the ‘national question’, as he presented them in internal discussions within the Bund and in his theoretical works. It demonstrates that Medem’s goal was not just to outline a political program for the Bund but to establish the foundations for a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the nation from a social democratic perspective. Strongly opposed to nationalism in all its manifestations, Medem put forward, as an alternative to the nation-state (demanded by all nationalist movements), a model of a ‘state of nationalities’ in which citizenship would be nationally neutral and granted equally to the members of all nationalities. At the same time, Medem proposed that the state must take an active role in protecting national minorities by granting each of them a national-cultural autonomy with a limited jurisdiction over cultural matters (and only those matters). Medem’s analysis of the national question and the Bund’s program of national-cultural autonomy (like the similar views formulated by Austro-Marxist theorists Karl Renner and Otto Bauer) deserve special attention, I argue; as a form of ‘multiculturalism avant la lettre’, they may offer insights relevant to today’s increasingly diverse and multicultural societies.

We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust (review)

Reviewed by: We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust David Cesarani (bio) We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust. By Hasia R. Diner. New York: New York University Press, 2009. xiii + 494 pp. For several years the debate over postwar responses to the Jewish catastrophe has simply recycled the same data, with partisans declaring that the cup is either half empty or half full depending on their point of view. Now, thanks to the mountain of evidence she has excavated, Hasia Diner has landed a knockout punch on those who assert that after 1945 American Jews were silent about the fate that befell the Jewish communities in Nazi-occupied Europe, preferring to forget about it while busily integrating into American society and enjoying the postwar boom. This is not to say that Diner has answered all the questions hanging over the manner in which American Jews during the 1950s treated recent Jewish history. But within the terms of her inquiry it is hard to see how it would be possible to do a fuller or a better job. Her book will change the landscape of postwar American Jewish history irrevocably; the textbooks will have to be rewritten. [End Page 338] Diner’s methodology is simplicity itself: she has gone back to the sources. She has waded through countless sermons and liturgies written to commemorate the murdered Jews of Europe. She has looked at the record of meetings organized by an array of Jewish organizations to see how their leaders and members reflected on the war years. She has examined every major national periodical, and many minor local ones, serving American Jews. She has gone from the assiduous collators of the Jewish Book Annual to the history books, novels, books for children, textbooks, prayer books and anything else that touched on the recent genocide. She has also listened to recordings of radio broadcasts and tracked down TV programs that handled the subject. The weight of evidence is crushing. If her narrative has one stylistic weakness it is due to the unavoidable necessity of repeating the same thing over and over again. Even before the war had ended American Jews began commemorating their brethren slaughtered in Europe. Each section of the community did so according to its own particular traditions. The non-Orthodox were most able to draft new prayers or adapt old ones; secular Jews, especially in the Jewish labor movement, quickly established dates and patterns for memorial meetings. Religious and nonreligious sentiments converged on Passover as a key time in the Jewish calendar for remembrance because it overlapped with the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. During the 1950s, Rabbi Rufus Learsi’s memorial haggadah was distributed to over 10,000 communal organizations and printed annually in over thirty Jewish periodicals. Dozens of Torah scrolls from destroyed communities in Europe were brought to the United States and distributed to congregations that made their reception and display a focal point for memorial activity. Contrary to the notion that little was written or published about the genocide, Jewish institutions launched research projects, collected material, and built up libraries. YIVO led the way, but the Institute for Jewish Affairs and the American Jewish Committee all contributed to a wave of publications. The Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Labor Committee channelled funds to survivor historians in Europe whose research fed back into public awareness in America. Within just a few years reviewers in Jewish Social Studies, notably Philip Friedman and Koppel Pinson, were bemoaning the sheer volume of historical works on the Nazi period. There was certainly no inhibition against exploring the subject. American Jews raised prodigious amounts of money for the survivors and sent aid of all kinds, including rabbis and social workers (such as Pinson). In campaigning for the improvement of conditions in displaced persons camps and struggling to enlarge the quotas for immigration to [End Page 339] the U.S., they constantly invoked recent horrors. Their incessant campaign against British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine and for the Zionist cause unhesitatingly drew on sympathy for Jews as the survivors of Nazi...

The Holocaust in Salonika, Eyewitness Accounts (review)

Reviewed by: The Holocaust in Salonika, Eyewitness Accounts Katerina G. Lagos Steven Bowman , editor. The Holocaust in Salonika, Eyewitness Accounts. Translated with introductions and notes by Isaac Benmayor. New York: Sephardic House & Bloch Publishing Co.2002. Pp. ii + 299, $19.95. In 1943, the Jewish population of Thessaloniki was estimated at 56,000 individuals. By the end of World War II, only 1,950 remained and/or returned to the city. The near decimation of the Thessaloniki Jewish community has recently become the focus of many studies. These studies can be divided into two major groups: those that analyze the various aspects of Holocaust in Thessaloniki and those that give voice to individuals who suffered during this period. Steven Bowman's The Holocaust in Salonika, Eyewitness Accounts is a compendium of three personal accounts: those of Yomtov Yacoel, Dr. Isaac Aaron Matarasso, and Salomon Meir Uziel. Bowman provides an introductory essay, and the personal accounts are translated from Greek and Judeo-Spanish by Isaac Benmayor. Benmayor also provides introductory comments and notes for each of the accounts. This book attempts to shed light on the events of the period, the internal conflicts within the Jewish community, and some of the hopes, fears, and suffering that the Jews experienced. The scope of the book, which comprises the first of a multi-volume series on the Greek Jewish experience during the Holocaust, is to include two categories of material: documents, reports, and memoirs of contemporaries during the period, as well as scholarly studies on the "Sephardi and Greek Holocaust" (p. ii). According to Bowman, this series attempts to overcome the lacuna in Greek Jewish Holocaust studies and provide scholars with material that can be used in broader Holocaust studies. In that regard, The Holocaust in Salonika provides excellent insight into the period. Scholars and students will find this compendium useful, especially if they do not know Greek or Judeo-Spanish. The personal accounts of Yacoel, Matarasso, and Uziel provide ample material for analyzing both internal relations within the Jewish community as well as establishing a timeline of events during the German occupation. Yacoel was the legal counsel for the Jewish community of Thessaloniki and participated in negotiations between the community and the German authorities. His memoir is the largest of the three, and Bowman judiciously places it at the beginning for it provides considerable detail on the events that befell the Community as well as a good basis for comparison to the Matarasso and Uziel segments. Matarasso gives a brief overview of the forced labor situation and of the deportations. The major emphasis in his memoir is on medical experiments performed on the Jews in the various concentration camps. It is worthwhile to note that this memoir is one of the rare accounts that describes these experiments and their long term effects. The Uziel memoir is the shortest of the three segments and also the most controversial. Uziel was widely condemned by his fellow Thessaloniki coreligionists for allegedly collaborating with the Germans in the deportation process. He was also accused of personally profiting from leases of stores and other real estate. Uziel devotes his memoir to explaining his participation in community affairs (he was on the community's Central Committee), his deportation, his return to Thessaloniki, and the accusations leveled against him by members of the Community. Uziel concludes his memoir by showing how the accusations were groundless and [End Page 233] how motives for the accusations stemmed from misplaced vengeance. Overall, the three memoirs provide ample material for analysis and also offer insight into the daily lives and activities of the Thessaloniki community. One of the most interesting aspects of the memoirs centers on the debate concerning the Chief Rabbi of Thessaloniki, Zvi Koretz, and his role in the deportations. Both the Yacoel and Matarasso accounts discuss Rabbi Koretz; Yacoel focusing on Koretz's lack of leadership and action to avert the impending deportations and Matarasso examining the issue of whether or not Koretz could have known about the deportations at an earlier date. Yacoel's assessment of Koretz is expressed in his discussion of the forced labor program and the Community's attempt to negotiate a buyout of Jewish labor...

Classless: On the Social Status of Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe in the Late Nineteenth Century

In this paper I examine the economic and political factors that undermined the social class structure in an ethnic community—the Jews of Russia and eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Compared with the documented rise and articulation of working classes in non-Jewish society in that region, Jews were caught in an opposite process, largely owing to discriminatory state policies and social pressures: Among Jews, artisans and petty merchants were increasingly reduced to a single, caste-like status. A Jewish middle class of significant size did not emerge from the petty trade sector and no significant industrial working class emerged from the crafts sector. Historians have largely overlooked the significance of these facts, in part because they have viewed this east European situation as a mere preamble to more sophisticated, modern class formation processes among immigrant Jews in Western societies, particularly in light of the long-term middle-class trajectory of their children. Those historians interested in labor history have mainly shown interest in such continuity as they could infer from the self-narratives of the Jewish labor movement, and have thus overstated the case for a long-standing Jewish “proletarian” tradition. In reassessing the historical record, I wish to put the Jewish social and economic situation in eastern Europe into better perspective by looking at the overall social and economic situation, rather than at incipient worker organizations alone. I also query whether a developing class culture, along the lines suggested by E. P. Thompson, was at all in evidence before Jewish mass emigration. This paper is thus a contribution to the history of labor—rather than organized labor—as well as a discussion of the roots of ethnic economic identity.

De Clementi's Report: The Nineteenth Zionist Congress, Lucerne, 1935, as Viewed by an Italian DiplomatMassimo Adorno is a research associate in contemporary history at the University of Messina, Italy. The author would like to thank Mrs Angelita La Spada for help in preparing this article

Once the Fascist dictatorship completed its national political consolidation at the end of 1929, it directed more and more of its attention towards setting out an explicit Fascist foreign policy in...

A “Museum of Bad Taste”?: The Jewish Labour Bund and the Bolshevik Position Regarding the National Question, 1903-14

This article discusses the debates on the national question between the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDRP), led by Vladimir Lenin, and the Jewish Labour Bund, then an integral part of the RSDRP, from 1903 to the First World War. The escalating conflict and competition between the Bolsheviks and the Bund shaped both groups’ position regarding national minorities, at a time when the former were striving to gain control of the Russian Marxist revolutionary movement. I examine Lenin’s and Joseph Stalin’s fierce criticism of the program of national-cultural autonomy advanced by the Bund and the Austro-Marxist theorists Karl Renner and Otto Bauer and show how Lenin and the Bolsheviks adopted the formula of “right of nations to self-determination” partly as a result of tactical considerations during their decade-long debate with the Bund. The Bolshevik leaders, Lenin and Stalin, formulated their ideas on nationalities in opposition to the Bund; the Bund thus played a role, even if a negative one, in the long-term development of Bolshevik ideas and policy.

Gospodarka wyzysku: „warunki życia” w gettach na kresach wschodnich

W niniejszym szkicu podejmę trzy tematy: tworzenia gett, robotników żydowskich i warunków życia, odwołując się do przykładów pochodzących przede wszystkich z małych gett. Od samego początku traumatyczny wpływ getta wiązał się utratą majątku, prywatności i autonomii. Analiza metod organizacji pracy przymusowej Żydów ujawnia znaczne rozwarstwienie i wśród żydowskich robotników przymusowych. We wszystkich gettach sprawą podstawową była żywność. Aspekty gospodarcze pokazują zasadniczą rolę stosunków między Żydami a miejscową ludnością nieżydowską – temat często pomijany przez badaczy Zagłady, skupiających się przede wszystkim na kształtowaniu polityki niemieckiej i jej niszczących następstw

Biology and the Jewish question after the revolution: one Soviet approach to the productivization of Jewish labor

In the 1920s a group of health professionals and biologists in the Soviet Union embraced the nascent eugenics movement in order to justify the promotion of physical labor among Jews. Eugenics offered a scientific approach to solving the “Jewish question” through the productivization of Soviet Jewry. Drawing upon the work of Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, this group linked the settlement of Jews on the land to the belief that the physiognomy of Jews engaged in physical labor would be genetically passed on to their offspring. The goal was to overcome the perceived debilitating psychological and physical traits of shtetl Jewry by mobilizing Soviet Jewry for the building of socialism. By the late 1920s, however, eugenics fell victim to the Kremlin’s materialist conception of human society that emphasized social engineering and voluntarism and excluded biological influences on the transformation of Soviet society.

Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938 1944, Wolf Gruner (New York: Cambridge University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006), xxiv + 322 pp., cloth $75.00

Wolf Gruner argues for four basic theses in Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis. First, forced labor was a central feature of Nazi persecution of Jews—one that most historians have strangely neglected or underestimated.1 It was not only a dominant feature of the Jewish experience prior to deportation, but also sufficiently important to the economic interests of the persecutors that it affected how they implemented their other policies of racial persecution. Second, the enforcement of Jewish forced labor was not primarily the prerogative of the SS. Rather, it was a striking example of the broad division of labor and widespread participation in the exploitation and persecution of Jews by various state institutions, regional and local authorities (especially labor offices and municipalities), and myriad private employers. At times, relations between the various beneficiaries and practitioners of forced labor were characterized by conflicting interests, but just as often there was compromise and cooperation. Third, a comparison of forced labor policies in Germany, Austria, the Protectorate, Silesia, the Warthegau, and the General Government reveals that forced labor was imposed on Jews in various ways in different places and at different times within the German empire. It is a complex historical subject that demands a nuanced and differentiated approach and cannot be characterized by sweeping and simplistic generalizations such as “destruction through labor.” Fourth, Jewish labor was exploited primarily for economic reasons, not just as a means of harassment and enervation paving the way to destruction. Systematic forced labor began long before the decisions were taken for a policy of extermination and, despite that policy, continued until the end of the war. Paradoxically, Gruner concludes, “Tens of thousands of Jews survived the Holocaust because they were exempted from genocide due to economic interests and labor shortages” (p. 294).

La grève des casquettiers parisiens en 1911-1912 : luttes sociales, action individuelle et construction d'une identité collective

The Union of cap-makers fills a specific place in the history of the labour movement and syndicate, first due to its early birth, as soon as 1896, and its exceptional claiming action, and due on the other hand to its typical socio-cultural setting-up since it was a professional structure solely constituted of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. 1911-1912, which are the years looked into, witnessed the biggest social tensions of the period preceding the first World War ; at that time, the leader of the syndicate is a Bolshevik exile, A. Lozovski, an experienced man. The cap-makers syndicate stands as a model of structure and struggle for all the Jewish labour movements. This is an outstanding period in the memory of the Jewish labour movements, and the structure model initiated by Lozovski persisted in spite of the ups and downs of the particularly unsteady universe of an immigrated population.

Jews in American politics: Past and present

T response of leaders of the American Jewish Comittee to the crisis of German Jewry in the 1930s found sick and old men, lacking influence in the American political arena, insecure about being Jews and often more busy with business and family than with the plight of German Jewry. In sharp contrast to this period, a very different picture emerges of Jewish leaders and organizations in the 1970s and 1980s. At least four major differences are worth noting. First, a single organization, the American Jewish Committee, had an initial advantage on access and ties to the Roosevelt administration in Washington. It was the major Jewish organization in American politics. There were other establishment organizations on the scene with considerably less influence, including the American Jewish Congress, B'nai B'rith (with its AntiDefamation League), and the Jewish Labor Committee. In the 1970s, there were many Jewish organizations, establishment and grassroots, operating actively on local, regional, and national levels in the struggle for Soviet Jewry. Many had influence and access in Washington, D.C. There was active competition between the grassroots and the establishment and within the establishment. For example, the National Conference for Soviet Jewry (NCSJ) competed (and cooperated) on national and local levels with the Council for Jewish Federations (CJF), National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Councils (NJCRAC), the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Coalition for Soviet Jewry as well as with the Union of Councils, representing the grassroots. All of these organizations had varying degrees of access and influence with Congress and the administration. A second significant difference is the quality of leadership. The top echelon of the American Jewish Committee of the 1930s consisted of very wealthy and professionally successful men. Many, however, were older, often sick and over extended; other commitments both professional and personal limited their time and involvement in concerns and activities of the Committee. For example, the Committee failed to find members to represent it "at home and abroad in meetings and conferences on the German Jewish crisis. The wealth and position of its members sometimes enabled contact with Europe and European Jewry, but when business did not permit a trip or vacation, the Committee was not represented." Family concerns also interfered. "In May 1939, realizing that the situation of Jews in Germany was desperate, the Committee wished to schedule additional meetings on Sunday. The plan failed, however, because in the spring so many of the members went to the country for weekends." Most of the organizations in the 1970s and 1980s had an overabundance of qualified and dynamic lay leadership, both men and women, with countless replacements waiting in the wings. Persons active in Jewish organizational life, often persons of means, dominated the lay leadership of the Soviet Jewry advocacy movement in the 1970s. Unlike their counterparts in the 1930s, however, most took leave from their other organizational, professional, and business pursuits and committed themselves full time to the Soviet Jewry advocacy movement. Importantly, tbr many, their personal, peer, and communal status was earned via activism in a particular Jewish organization. Many of these organizations in the 1970s and 1980s had extensive and expanding professional staffs especially in existing and long established organizations like CJF, NJCRAC, American Jewish Committee, American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), and Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). In sharp contrast, the ad hoc and newer organizations were hampered by staff shortages reflecting a lack of fiscal stability. The NCSJ, for example, suffered from a shortage of staff throughout which harmed its activities and effectiveness. Third, and most importantly, establishment Jewish leaders during the 1930s were insecure as American Jews. They often refrained from pressing Jewish issues and Jewish causes. They sought Christian allies to fight antiSemitism "without American Jews appearing in...[the struggle])." The American Jewish Committee, for example, adopted "quict diplomacy," "believing it to be

The Jewish Labor Committee, American Labor, and the Rescue of European Socialists, 1934–1941

The Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), founded in New York in 1934, was the vanguard of American labor's anti-Nazi and antifascist activism. The JLC grew out of the Jewish labor movement in the US. In 1940–1941, it achieved the rescue of hundreds of European labor and social-democratic party leaders trapped in France by the invading German army or in Lithuania by the Soviet army. Among these persons were some of the foremost leaders of the Labour and Socialist International and of the International Federation of Trade Unions. Many others were Polish Bundists, the JLC's founders' original political family, doubly exposed to Nazi brutality by their Jewish identity and social-democratic positions. This event is the focal point from which American labor's international solidarity for the labor victims of Nazism and fascism can be observed. In addition, the connection between the JLC and the Emergency Rescue Committee whose agent, Varian Fry, rescued artists and intellectuals, is also established in the paper.

Book Review

Few issues have divided Poles and Jews more deeply than the Nazi occupation of Poland during the Second World War and the subsequent slaughter of almost ninety percent of Polish Jewry. Many Jewish historians have argued that, during the occupation, Poles at best displayed indifference to the fate of the Jews and at worst were willing accomplices of the Nazis. Many Polish scholars, however, deny any connection between the prewar culture of antisemitism and the wartime situation. They emphasized that Poles were also victims of the Nazis and, for the most part, tried their best to protect the Jews. This collection of essays, representing three generations of Polish and Jewish scholars, is the first attempt since the fall of Communism to reassess the existing historiography of Polish-Jewish relations just before, during, and after the Second World War. In the spirit of detached scholarly inquiry, these essays fearlessly challenge commonly held views on both sides of the debates. The authors are committed to analyzing issues fairly and to reaching a mutual understanding. Joshua D. Zimmerman is an assistant professor of East European Jewish History at Yeshiva University, where he holds the Eli and Diana Zborowski Chair in Holocaust Studies. He is the author of the forthcoming title Poles, Jews and the Politics of Nationality: The Jewish Labor Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Czarist Russia, 1892-1914.

Walking Streets, Talking History: The Making of Odessa

Through walking streets and talking history, the members of the My Odessa club sense their city as place. History is encountered in buildings, ruins, monuments, and stories as both a diffuse feeling and a dialogic process. The walkers' practice of exploring nooks and crannies of the city and speaking with local residents is informed by a large family form of sociality, and a notion of Odessa as courtyard where space is conceived as communal. In walking the city, participants subvert and recreate aspects of Soviet and post-Soviet urban space and generate a sense of their city as distinct from a national space. (Space and place, sensing history, postsocialist transformation) ********** Every Sunday in the southern Ukrainian port city of between 20 and 30 residents, mainly elderly, gather on a street in old Odessa, (1) the area built prior to the October Revolution of 1917. With their guide, Valerii Netrebskii, they ramble for two or three hours down a chosen street, stopping frequently to be transported to past epochs by Valerii's layered account of the history of a particular building, empty lot, or courtyard. They discover hidden parts of streets, such as an overgrown block of Champagne Lane. They enter courtyards and speak with residents, as on Cable Street where walkers, some of them Jews, debated with a Jewish resident the pros and cons of emigrating. They ponder the connection of certain places with well-known landmarks, as when Valerii explained how the fish fountains on the Pushkin Monument were made in the Jewish Labor Association's technical college on the corner of Bazaar and Cable Streets. They use motifs from Odessan authors' works in describing their environment, as Inna did in noting how a new metal balcony reminded her of Bezenchyk's coffin in the novel Twelve Chairs. Walkers express wonder when discovering new places, outrage at the poor upkeep of architectural landmarks, irritation when previously accessible buildings are fenced off, and amusement at participants' jokes and interjections. The walks of the My Odessa club, which I joined from August to November 2002, are about sensing Odessa as place. (2) Sensing Odessa as place as these walkers do is intricately related to sensing history and the experience of sociability. Although the group is relatively small and not overtly political, in that it does not lobby the local administration, through these walks a sense of the urban landscape is transmitted in which Odessa is conceived as Russian, cosmopolitan, cultured, distinct from Ukraine, and more connected with Russia and the outside world. The group's practices are influenced not only by Soviet Odessan concepts of urban space and the formation of a post-Soviet public sphere in which informal groups can organize, but also by the prerevolutionary architecture and geography of the city. Odessa was founded in 1794 by Catherine II to stabilize, settle, and develop trade in the lands north of the Black Sea that the Russian Empire had acquired from the Ottoman Empire (Herlihy 1986). The city was established a few decades after the remaining vestiges of autonomous Ukrainian political formations east of the Dnipro River had been dismantled; indeed, Ukraine did not attain full political sovereignty until 1991, with the exception of brief periods in 1918-1919. Throughout the nineteenth century, Odessa was one of the most rapidly developing cities in Europe, and by the mid- 1800s was the third-most prominent city in the Russian Empire in size, economy, and cultural importance. Inhabited by Greeks, Italians, French, Poles, Jews, Bulgarians, Germans, Moldovans, Russians, and Ukrainians, among others, the city was cosmopolitan from the outset. It emerged from Catherine's policy of attracting foreign merchants, administrators, and colonists from western Europe and the Ottoman Empire to develop Novorossia (New Russia). By the early twentieth century the city was linguistically and culturally more Russian than a century previously. …

Gal-Ed: On the History of the Jews in Poland by David s> Engel (review)

556 SEER, 8i, 3, 2003 purposesof guidance on a pop-up. Bykeyingin any one of the many hundreds of keywords given on the pop-up, the user can come up with a list of all chartersrelevantto his or herline of interrogation.Upon furtherenquiry,the useris also given a very briefdescriptionof each relevantdocument and, with the press of a key, its thumbnail. A single sweep of the mouse transformsthe thumbnailinto an almost real document, on your very own computer screen, which can be enlargedand even printedout. This is not only tremendous fun but also makes the Royal Books an unexpectedly important source. By using the pop-up index as a guide to personal names, one can, for instance, find a huge number of sixteenthcentury and later referencesto familieswhich are thought to have expired in the MiddleAges. Likewise,it ispossibleto track,decade by decade, the history of individual properties, or to read the full texts of treaties and of hitherto unpublishednegotiations with provincial diets. In short, what was previously an almost useless source has by the ingenuity and diligence of its engineers, programmers and historical consultants been transformedinto an object of easy plunder and information. Of course, in order to use these disksone has to have some grasp of Hungarian 'computer-speak'.One also has to know Latin and to be ready to have a go at reading older calligraphicstyles,not all of which are immediatelypenetrable. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies MARTYNRADY University College London Engel, David (ed.). Gal-Ed.OntheHistoryofthejews inPoland.Gal Ed Society for Historical Research on PolishJewry, i 7. School of Jewish Studies, Tel Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, 2000. 212 pp. + I 78 pp. Notes. Bibliography .Index. Priceunknown. A distinct aura of generational shift surroundsthe yearbook Gal-Edfor the year 2000. With this issue, a long-serving member of the editorial board, Emanuel Melzer stepsdown, and a whole section is devoted to the memory of the late founding editor, Moshe Mishkinsky,the renowned historian of the Jewish labour movement in Eastern Europe. Most of the members of the passing generation were natives of the region that they studied, and deeply imbued with its cultural ethos. There is clear concern among the senior generation that their successorsretain their commitment 'to underscore the great variety and multilingualityof PolishJewish culture, in the hope that doing so will encourage the scholarswho are assuming centre stage today to broaden their familiarity with many different topics and types of sources'. Consequently, and in contrastto its friendlyrivalPolin,Gal-Edeschews issues devoted to a single topic, publishes documentary materials in their original language, and retainsitsbi-lingualEnglish-Hebrewformat. It is difficultto review a scholarlym6lange, but a few general observations on the contents of the currentvolume are in order.The explorationof radical Jewish politics in Eastern Europe remains a special emphasis, with articles devoted to the Bund and the Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hazair (by Roni Gechtman, Mitityahu Minc and Eli Tzur). Polish-Jewishrelations are REVIEWS 557 also well traced, as in Sabina Lewin's examination of Jewish secondary schooling in the tsarist-ruledKingdom of Poland and in the inter-warPolish state. She pays special attention to the effect of external political and social forces on the tempo of the processofJewish polonization. PiotrWr6beloffers a content analysisof the officialnewspaperof the PolishGovernment-in-Exile, Dziennik Polski.Wr6bel demonstratesthat the paper was a major conduit for information about the evolving mass-murder of East European Jews. This articlelinksnicely with Natalia Aleksiun'sreview of Polish historiographyon the Holocaust from I945 to I998. Literarystudiesare well representedby Michael Steinlauf's study of Mark Arnshteyn, the bi-lingual (Polish and Yiddish) playwright and actor. The theatre, as Steinlauf demonstrates,functioned as a 'borderland'where Poles and PolishJews interacted in a unique way. Special attention should be paid to Hana Shlomi's study of the resettlement of Jewish repatriantsfrom the Soviet Union to Lower Silesia. This is a contribution to a topic that is beginning to attractscholarlyattention:the 'ethnic cleansing' that took place in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War. The settlement discussed by Shlomi should be seen in the context of polices that culminated in Operation Vistula in 1947, the wholesale deportationof 'alien' elements of the population of south-easternPoland. Gender...