Jewish Socialist Research Articles

Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, ed. Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe

Reviewed by: Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis Loren Kruger Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, Eds. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4284-7 (cloth) $99.95; ISBN 978-0-8223-4262-5 (paper). $29.95 This volume reproduces Public Culture's special issue on Johannesburg (2004), omitting only Nuttall's interview with artist Rodney Place. It also includes some new essays and evocative images, especially charcoal drawings by William Kentridge and photographs of works by other Johannesburg-based artists like Penny Siopis. The introduction by Nuttall an Mbembe stresses their distinction between studies of the city that rely on paradigms of development, and their intention to focus on "urban form and city life as keys to understanding [Johannesburg's] metropolitan modernity" (11). Overstating their case somewhat by asserting that "few commentators" have focused on urban form, they slight predecessors such as Emerging Johannesburg (2003), edited by one of their contributors, Lindsay Bremner, and omit others like Ordinary Cities (2006), by Jennifer Robinson, both of which balance socio-economic analysis with reflections on urban form, as well as articles by several authors on re-imagining Johannesburg in journals at home (Scrutiny2, African Identities) and abroad (RAL, JSAS). Despite the editors' skepticism about planning and development, the strongest contributors to Johannesburg remain those who combine expert knowledge of city history and current policy with street-level experience and the imagination of its future. In "People as Infrastructure," AbdouMalique Simone builds on his research on African cities from Douala to Khartoum as well as ethnographic investigation of Johannesburg's inner city to analyze migrants' and locals' informal practices of "belonging and becoming," which he and Graeme Götz formulated [End Page 186] in Emerging Johannesburg (123−47). Against Simone's deep analysis, shorter pieces or "voice lines" on cosmopolitanism like Stefan Helgesson's essay on Mozambican poetry on Johannesburg and the email exchange between Tom Odhiambo and Robert Muponde seem unfinished. In contrast, Bremner's reflections on "reformulating township space" draw on her considerable work with urban design, documented in her book Johannesburg: One City, Colliding Worlds (2004), so that her comments here on one project for which she was the architect, rebuilding Freedom Square in Kliptown, where the Freedom Charter was launched in 1955, resonate beyond this site to the city's manifold urban forms. Two other "voice lines" from the original publication stand out: Mark Gevisser's comments on Constitution Hill, where his work as "content advisor" (316) helped to shape the museum and other educational installations, are absorbing but might have been pithier had he presented his views directly rather than in interview responses (see also Segal, ed Number Four, to which Gevisser contributed); John Matshikiza's reflections in "Instant City" on his experience as a returning exile not only vividly plot the tension between belonging and alienation, cosmopolitanism and xenophobia, but also, in his notion of the city as "unfinished movie" (222), evoke film and television narratives of Johannesburg whose representations of the city deserve attention. Apart from the absent screens of film and television, several contributors highlight the city's surfaces. Following the editors' lead, David Bunn begins "Art Johannesburg" by asserting the city's "shallowness" (137) but his most illuminating comments, especially on Kentridge's animations, do more than "draw on surfaces" (143). As the single historian in the volume, Jonathan Hyslop digs deeper into the past to analyze significant sites and figures that may no longer show clearly on the surface of the present, from Mohantas Gandhi at the Hamidia Mosque in 1908, to Fanny Klennerman, Jewish socialist founder of Vanguard Bookshop, from the 1930s to 1970s the city's source for cosmopolitan reading, to writer Hermann Charles Bosman on fascist and anti-fascist clashes in Rissik Street in the 1930s. The agents of political confrontation may have changed since Bosman but the site has once again attracted attention; the Rissik Street post office, now shuttered, functioned as location for Hard Copy, a television fictional series on city journalists (2005−07) to which Matshikiza contributed, reminding viewers of the historical traces beneath the surfaces of the built environment. Despite some omissions and editorial glitches (references in the bibliography to articles in...

Arnold in Aysheshok, Schiller in Shnipishok: Imperatives of “Culture” in East European Jewish Nationalism and Socialism

When the February Revolution of 1917 unfettered public life across the Russian Empire, hundreds of thousands threw themselves into activism on behalf of numerous, conflicting visions of political, social, and cultural transformation. Although histories of the Russian Revolution still resonate with tropes of 1917 as rupture, most of these activists initially greeted February as a chance to realize programs born well before 1917, in the decades preceding the Revolution. Among the divided multitude of whom this was true was twenty-two-year-old Natan Bistritsky. Raised in a small, heavily Jewish town in the Ukraine and vouchsafed a traditional Jewish education, Bistritsky had broken with the world of Eastern Europe’s distinctive pietistic Judaism as an adolescent. He embraced instead two closely linked, self-consciously modern ideals: Jewish political nationalism and a secular nationalist vision of Jewish cultural reformation. Now, first in Moscow and then, by early 1918, in Kiev, he worked for Russia’s resurgent Zionist movement and for a Hebraist cultural movement that sought to create a modern Hebrew-language culture and transform Russia’s variegated Jewish population into a nation of secular Hebrews. Bistritsky—he would later assume a Hebrew name, Agmon, as the culmination of his own Hebraist self-transformation—was charged with bringing these ideals to the swelling Jewish populations of these metropoles, where small, Russified Jewish bourgeoisies were now swamped by tens of thousands of Jewish war refugees and

Vers un nouveau franco-judaïsme. La création de l'Université Populaire Juive

By the beginning of the XXth century, while in France the tensions between Zionists and Israelites were paroxysmal, a new Jewish Institute was born which brought together both tendencies. The Zionists conceived that it could help as a means of propaganda for the Jewish immigrants recently settled in the fourth district of Paris, this University receives a necessary financial help granted by the members of the Israelite community. The new partners had a common enemy : Jewish socialism. Similar to other popular universities, the PJU is unable to bring together the elite and the working classes. It appeals to some public thanks to the various sectors, but its political and cultural schedule is dedicated to middle-class people who are not preoccupied with the same difficulties as the working masses. It aims at introducing into cultural leisure activities a population deprived of spare time, but not of everyday worries about material survival. However the history of this Institute is not only that of a failure. In spite of the fights for influence between Zionists and Israelites, it brings together the two groups, thus allowing political and mainly cultural exchanges. As such, it represents the basis of a Jewish cultural awakening in the twenties and entices new elites to imagine a new Franco-Judaism.

Exporting Yiddish Socialism: New York's Role in the Russian Jewish Workers' Movement

From the late 1880s to the early 1900s, Jewish socialists in the United States shipped thousands of Yiddish newspapers, journals, and pamphlets to the Russian Empire. The literature was used to spread revolutionary ideas and secular knowledge among a relatively small but growing number of Russian Jews drawn into the nascent Jewish workers’ movement. This article examines which publications were sent, how they were smuggled into and circulated within Russia, and their influence on the Jewish workers’ movement. In doing so, the article argues in favor of a transnational framework for understanding relations between Jews in the United States and Russia, one that recognizes the influence of America on developments in Russia as well as the reverse.

The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture (review)

The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, by David E. Fishman. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 190 pp. $30.00. As of late, there has been no shortage of books on Yiddish. Ranging from popular to semi-academic to academic works, dozens of recent books have examined the Yiddish language, its literature, culture, and history. With few exceptions, most of these works have presented trite and sentimental overviews of the history and development of Yiddish, with frequent emphasis on its inherent wit and charm. They tell a general, often facile, story of the origins of Yiddish and its evolution, aimed at readers who are relatively unfamiliar with this story. A rare and welcome exception to this trend comes from David E. Fishman, a scholar of east European Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. The primary objective of Fishman's book is not an all-encompassing history of the Yiddish language, but a mapping out of the evolution of modern Yiddish culture from its fledgling years in the 1860s to its growth and diffusion in the years after World War One. Fishman claims that he is setting out to reevaluate the rise of modern Yiddish culture from a sociological approach rather than an ideological one. However, to my mind, his book is not completely free of ideology. From beginning to end, Fishman attempts to break the paradigm of seeing Yiddish culture in tandem with the rise of Jewish Socialism, especially the Bund. He sets up a bit of a straw man by first claiming that most histories of Yiddish place an exaggerated significance on the role of the Bund in developing a modern Yiddish culture, bur he does not really cite which works he has in mind. He simply asserts that this was the view propagated by Bundists themselves, then later accepted as the consensus view in mainstream scholarship. He then proceeds to tear down this straw man by marshalling evidence to show that the Bund's role was limited and that modern Yiddish culture was a much larger phenomenon, not at all confined to socialist circles. Yet, even in trying to deemphasize the role of the Bund, he actually shows just how important it was in creating the audience for the modern Yiddish culture whose development he chronicles. Despite this subtle yet persistent attempt at deradicalizing modern Yiddish culture (also evident in Fishman's almost total dismissal of Soviet Yiddish culture), Fishman's book is an illuminating work of serious scholarship that provides a fresh look at the growth of Yiddish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Fishman divides the book into two sections, the first dealing with the emergence of modern Yiddish culture, mainly literature, press and theatre, in tsarist Russia from the late nineteenth century to World War One; and the second focusing on Yiddish culture in Poland between the wars. The major contribution of the first section is Fishman's elucidation of how tsarist policy was the chief obstacle to the growth of Yiddish culture from the 1880s until 1905. He persuasively refutes the common assumptions that Yiddish cultural development was delayed because Russian Jews were not sufficiently modernized, or because the Maskilim effectively opposed Yiddish, showing instead that the tsarist government's censorship laws and bans on Yiddish theatres and schools were the central factors limiting the rise of modern Yiddish culture. Fishman singles out 1905 as the turning point for Yiddish culture in Russia, owing to a loosening of tsarist restrictions and a growth in Jewish national identity, across ideological spectrums, in which Yiddish became widely championed by Jewish communal leaders and intellectuals. …

Beyond More Jews Doing Jewish: Clarifying the Goals of Informal Jewish Education

Why has it been so difficult to define the goals of Jewish informal education? Often informal educators define their work in terms of the goals of Jewish socialization. Those terms have worked to attract funders' support, but also limited the educational creativity of this field. This article argues for a dual defining of goals: socialization and educational. Defining the educational goals leads to considering the works of Cremin, Peters, and Csikszentmihalyi who disentangle the enterprise of education from the broader sweep of socialization. Viewed apart from its socializing functions, informal Jewish education becomes the moment for going deeper and experiencing our Judaism in its full creative potential. A camp music program is offered as an example of how these two goals can operate together, but lead in distinct directions.

Figures of Thought and Figures of Flesh: "Jews" and "Judaism" in Late-Medieval Spanish Poetry and Politics

Previous articleNext article No AccessFigures of Thought and Figures of Flesh: "Jews" and "Judaism" in Late-Medieval Spanish Poetry and PoliticsDavid NirenbergDavid Nirenberg Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 81, Number 2Apr., 2006 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0038713400002633 Views: 85Total views on this site Citations: 20Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 2006 The Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Elsa Marmursztejn Olivi on the Hebrew Bible and the Jews: Scholastic Texts from Languedoc in the 1290s, Speculum 97, no.11 (Dec 2021): 77–111.https://doi.org/10.1086/717255Lesley K. Twomey Christ’s Holy Week Sermons: Women’s Preaching and its Oral and Written Sources in Late-medieval Valencia, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 96, no.1010 (Nov 2019): 1113–1134.https://doi.org/10.3828/bhs.2019.66Jessica A. Boon Violence and the “virtual Jew” in Castilian Passion narratives, 1490s–1510s, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 8, no.11 (Sep 2015): 110–129.https://doi.org/10.1080/17546559.2015.1077987Ana M. Gómez-Bravo Slander and the right to be an author in fifteenth-century Spain, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 16, no.33 (Nov 2015): 239–253.https://doi.org/10.1080/14636204.2015.1103361 Introduction, (Jan 2014): 1–28.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376859-002 Mischievous Lovers, Hidden Moors, and Cross-Dressers, (Jan 2014): 29–60.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376859-003 Mestizo Networks, (Jan 2014): 61–93.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376859-004 Hiding in Plain Sight, (Jan 2014): 95–131.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376859-005 Good Blood and Spanish Habits, (Jan 2014): 133–169.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376859-006 “Asi lo Paresçe por su Aspeto”, (Jan 2014): 171–203.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376859-007 The Problem of Caste, (Jan 2014): 205–226.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376859-008 Conclusion, (Jan 2014): 227–237.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376859-009 Notes, (Jan 2014): 245–301.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376859-010 Bibliography, (Jan 2014): 307–332.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376859-011Felipe Rojas Representing An-‘Other’ Ganymede: The Multifaceted Character of Ismael in Tirso de Molina's La prudencia en la mujer (1634), Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 91, no.44 (Jan 2014): 347–364.https://doi.org/10.3828/bhs.2014.23Ryan D. Giles Picaresque fatherhood: racial and literary heritage in Guzmán de Alfarache 1.1, Neohelicon 40, no.11 (May 2013): 227–244.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-013-0167-zMonica Juneja, Kim Siebenhüner, Benjamin Scheller The Materiality of Difference, The Medieval History Journal 12, no.22 (Jul 2009): 405–430.https://doi.org/10.1177/097194580901200210Michelle Hamilton Hispanism and Sephardic studies, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 1, no.22 (Jun 2009): 179–194.https://doi.org/10.1080/17546550903136082Joanne Rappaport MISCHIEVOUS LOVERS, HIDDEN MOORS, AND CROSS-DRESSERS: PASSING IN COLONIAL BOGOTÁ, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 10, no.11 (Mar 2009): 7–25.https://doi.org/10.1080/14636200902771020 Sean Eisen Murphy Concern about Judaizing in Academic Treatises on the Law, c. 1130-c. 1230, Speculum 82, no.33 (Oct 2015): 560–594.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0038713400010253

Joshua D. Zimmerman. Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality: The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Tsarist Russia, 1892–1914. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. xiii, 360 pp.

For a half-millennium until the 1940s, the history of Poles and Jews was inextricably intertwined. In particular, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Poles and Jews alike were faced with sweeping economic and social changes that challenged—even threatened—livelihood, traditions, and identity. One way in which both Jews and Poles attempted to make sense of “modernity” (to use the word as shorthand for industrialization, secularization, and the communications revolution of this period) was to subscribe to one or another form of socialism. In the Polish lands, socialism and nationalism were never mutually exclusive, indeed on the whole, the two movements overlapped considerably. Again, this was just as true for Jews (Bund, Poalei Tsiyon) as for Poles (PPS). Josh Zimmerman's important book examines relations between the two most important pre-1914 Polish and Jewish socialist parties, the Bund and the PPS. Both parties aimed simultaneously to pave the way for international socialism and to develop their respective nations (Jews and Poles). Both parties rejected national chauvinism or prejudice, arguing in a Herderian vein that only when each nation developed its full potential could true internationalism reign. Despite their theoretical agreement, however, the parties frequently clashed on practical issues. Examining these practical differences, Zimmerman has much to tell us about the nature of being Jewish, Polish, and/or socialist in late imperial Russia.

Kishinev and the Twentieth Century: Introduction

BECAUSE THE HOLOCAUST DOMINATES our historical awareness, it is doubly important to recover the force of the events at Kishinev in 1903 on their own terms. How the memory of Kishinev shaped the responses of the actors and bystanders during the Holocaust period and how, in turn, the memory of the Holocaust shaped the memory of Kishinev are all, to be sure, legitimate and even crucial questions. But we must start with the event itself. The case for the status of Kishinev as a turning point in modern Jewish history rests on its relationship to the wave of pogroms that were visited upon Jewish communities in southern Russia in 1880 – 81. It was that earlier outbreak that was the real surprise. In contrast to the common notion that the story of Eastern European Jewry is the story of one pogrom after another, the pogroms of 1880 – 81 were wholly unprecedented in their volume, ferocity, and concerted nature. They marked the appalling debut of a modern form of antisemitism that was fomented by both the Right and the Left, and, within the internal sphere of Jewish culture, they brought the lingering aspirations of the Enlightenment to a crashing demise. What had shifted profoundly between 1881 and 1903 was Jewish political self-awareness. The shame of mass victimization had spurred the emergence of political Zionism and Jewish socialism, both of which emphasized the exigent need for organized self-defense. This was a priority taken up not only on the level of ideology but at the most applied local level in the Zionist and socialist clubs and associations that were established in almost every Jewish population ❙ 1

Florence Kelley: A Factory Inspector Campaigns Against Sweatshop Labor

FLORENCE KELLEY WAS perhaps the most famous and effective of the labor commissioners, appointed in Progressive Era America, to inspect factory working conditions and determine their level of compliance with the new protective labor legislation passed in the early 20th century.1 Kelley began life as a feminist and social democrat. She studied at the University of Zurich, at that time the only European university to grant degrees to women; married a Russian Jewish socialist medical student; joined the German Social Democratic Party; and translated into English Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England.2–4 Back in America, she left her by now abusive husband, moved to Chicago, lived in Jane Addams’ Hull House, completed a law degree, and became a leader of the fight against unsafe labor conditions. She visited roughly a thousand “sweaters’ victims” in the garment industry, recording their conditions both at work and at home. Hearing of her reputation, Carroll Wright, head of the US Department of Labor, hired her to direct a cadre of workers to collect data on every house, tenement, and room in the Nineteenth Ward of Chicago. Kelley often spoke at protest meetings against sweatshop conditions. In 1892 she wrote a sweeping report on the sweat-shop problem, from which this selection is a brief extract. (Extracts from the entire report can be accessed at http://womhist.binghamton.edu/factory/doclist.htm.) Her recommendations were adopted by the Illinois legislature, which in 1893 passed a law limiting women and children’s working hours to 8 per day, prohibiting sweatshops, and creating a factory inspector’s office with a staff of 12, half of whom had to be women. Kelley was immediately appointed chief factory inspector, and she summarized her highly effective reform strategy in 4 words: “investigate, educate, legislate, enforce.”5 Although the Illinois Manufacturers Association fought Kelley and won a Supreme Court battle declaring the limitation of women’s wage labor to 8 hours per day to be unconstitutional, and although Kelley lost her job as chief factory inspector, she was undeterred. She agreed to serve as secretary of the newly formed National Consumers League (NCL) and transformed that organization into the nation’s leading exponent of protective labor legislation for women and children. Kelley built 64 local consumer leagues across the country to help promote and pass labor legislation. In 1908, a case between the Oregon NCL and a local laundry owner was argued by Louis D. Brandeis; the court upheld as constitutional an Oregon law limiting women’s wage labor to 10 hours a day. Other states would soon agree to limit the hours of labor for women and children and, ultimately, for all workers.

At the Crossroads Between War and Genocide: A Reassessment of Jewish Ideology in 1940

In the months following the outbreak of World War II, East European Jewry stood at the crossroads of life and death. Unable to alter their political fate, a small group of intellectuals took refuge in ideology by continuing to prepare the journal that they had begun before the war. This journal, appropriately named Afn sheydveg (At the Crossroads), provided the prism through which its contributors continued to interpret the evolving catastrophe. Only two issues of the journal reached print—in April and August 1939, respectively— before the outbreak of World War II. The editors of the journal, Elias Tcherikower (1881–1943) and Yisroel Efroykin (1884–1954), East European Jewish émigrés living in Paris, gathered articles from Jewish intellectuals throughout the world. As former Diaspora nationalists and Yiddishists, however, Tcherikower and Efroykin invited their ideological compatriots Zelig Kalmanovitsh (1885–1944), Avrom Menes (1897– 1969), and Avrom Golomb (1888–1982) to participate as regulars in the journal. Even in the aftermath of the outbreak of World War II, Tcherikower and Efroykin continued to prepare for the publication of a third issue [End Page 170] of their journal. Only the Nazi invasion of France in September 1940 prevented the publication of this issue. Recently, I discovered the manuscripts of this third issue. Throughout the three editions of Afn sheydveg, the essays of its regular contributors shared the following features: a sense of betrayal by both fascist and democratic countries; a call for a Jewish retreat from politics in response to this betrayal; a bemoaning of depleted Jewish strength due to a failed attempt at assimilation; and the search for an organic Jewish life that they believed had existed in the medieval ghetto. Who was this "Afn sheydveg group," which voiced such conservative opinions at the moment of European Jewry's greatest crisis? These intellectuals represented the second generation of Diaspora nationalists and Yiddishists who heeded the call of such ideological founders as Shimon Dubnow (1860–1941), Chaim Zhitlowsky (1865–1943), and I. L. Peretz (1852–1915). Because of the similar, though not identical, trajectory of these men's careers and ideological transformation, viewing them as a historical cohort proves constructive. Following their writing and activity from 1905 to 1940 reveals valuable insight into the challenges facing at least one prominent stream of Diaspora nationalist, Yiddishist thought. The political and ideological career of this cohort was one of successive waves of ideological disillusionment. Tcherikower, Efroykin, Kalmanovitsh, and Menes had all begun their careers committed to Jewish socialism, Diaspora nationalism, and secular, modern Yiddish culture. Throughout their careers, these men successively shed their faith in these ideologies. Understanding their careers through this model of ever-increasing disillusionment helps to explain the seemingly extreme statements that they expressed on the pages of Afn sheydveg. In order to trace the ideological trajectory of this cohort, it is important to distinguish between its inner and outer circles. At the innermost point of the circle stood Tcherikower, Efroykin, and Kalmanovitsh. Born in the early and mid-1880s, these men received a traditional Jewish education before attending university in Russia, Switzerland, and Germany, respectively. All three first became active in socialist and Diaspora nationalist politics during the Revolution of 1905. Following the Revolution, Tcherikower spent a year in tsarist prison for revolutionary activity with the Mensheviks.1 At the same time, Efroykin and Kalmanovitsh helped form the Sejmist Party, dedicated both to socialism and to the establishment of maximal Jewish national autonomy in Russia.2 During World War I, Tcherikower, Efroykin, and Kalmanovitsh focused almost exclusively on the cause of Diaspora nationalism. In America during the war years, Tcherikower wrote columns in the [End Page 171] American Yiddish press in which he urged his socialist readers to join Jewish bourgeois leaders in war relief efforts as well as to continue to fight them for economic justice in the work place. He also collaborated with the socialist Zionist thinker...

At the Crossroads Between War and Genocide: A Reassessment of Jewish Ideology in 1940

In the months following the outbreak of World War II, East European Jewry stood at the crossroads of life and death. Unable to alter their political fate, a small group of intellectuals took refuge in ideology by continuing to prepare the journal that they had begun before the war. This journal, appropriately named Afn sheydveg (At the Crossroads), provided the prism through which its contributors continued to interpret the evolving catastrophe. Only two issues of the journal reached print—in April and August 1939, respectively— before the outbreak of World War II. The editors of the journal, Elias Tcherikower (1881–1943) and Yisroel Efroykin (1884–1954), East European Jewish émigrés living in Paris, gathered articles from Jewish intellectuals throughout the world. As former Diaspora nationalists and Yiddishists, however, Tcherikower and Efroykin invited their ideological compatriots Zelig Kalmanovitsh (1885–1944), Avrom Menes (1897– 1969), and Avrom Golomb (1888–1982) to participate as regulars in the journal. Even in the aftermath of the outbreak of World War II, Tcherikower and Efroykin continued to prepare for the publication of a third issue [End Page 170] of their journal. Only the Nazi invasion of France in September 1940 prevented the publication of this issue. Recently, I discovered the manuscripts of this third issue. Throughout the three editions of Afn sheydveg, the essays of its regular contributors shared the following features: a sense of betrayal by both fascist and democratic countries; a call for a Jewish retreat from politics in response to this betrayal; a bemoaning of depleted Jewish strength due to a failed attempt at assimilation; and the search for an organic Jewish life that they believed had existed in the medieval ghetto. Who was this "Afn sheydveg group," which voiced such conservative opinions at the moment of European Jewry's greatest crisis? These intellectuals represented the second generation of Diaspora nationalists and Yiddishists who heeded the call of such ideological founders as Shimon Dubnow (1860–1941), Chaim Zhitlowsky (1865–1943), and I. L. Peretz (1852–1915). Because of the similar, though not identical, trajectory of these men's careers and ideological transformation, viewing them as a historical cohort proves constructive. Following their writing and activity from 1905 to 1940 reveals valuable insight into the challenges facing at least one prominent stream of Diaspora nationalist, Yiddishist thought. The political and ideological career of this cohort was one of successive waves of ideological disillusionment. Tcherikower, Efroykin, Kalmanovitsh, and Menes had all begun their careers committed to Jewish socialism, Diaspora nationalism, and secular, modern Yiddish culture. Throughout their careers, these men successively shed their faith in these ideologies. Understanding their careers through this model of ever-increasing disillusionment helps to explain the seemingly extreme statements that they expressed on the pages of Afn sheydveg. In order to trace the ideological trajectory of this cohort, it is important to distinguish between its inner and outer circles. At the innermost point of the circle stood Tcherikower, Efroykin, and Kalmanovitsh. Born in the early and mid-1880s, these men received a traditional Jewish education before attending university in Russia, Switzerland, and Germany, respectively. All three first became active in socialist and Diaspora nationalist politics during the Revolution of 1905. Following the Revolution, Tcherikower spent a year in tsarist prison for revolutionary activity with the Mensheviks.1 At the same time, Efroykin and Kalmanovitsh helped form the Sejmist Party, dedicated both to socialism and to the establishment of maximal Jewish national autonomy in Russia.2 During World War I, Tcherikower, Efroykin, and Kalmanovitsh focused almost exclusively on the cause of Diaspora nationalism. In America during the war years, Tcherikower wrote columns in the [End Page 171] American Yiddish press in which he urged his socialist readers to join Jewish bourgeois leaders in war relief efforts as well as to continue to fight them for economic justice in the work place. He also collaborated with the socialist Zionist thinker...

Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent (review)

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Fall 2004) 719–722 GERALD SORIN. Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv Ⳮ 386. Irving Howe is probably best remembered for having written (with the assistance of Kenneth Libo) World of our Fathers, an eloquent and moving account of Jewish secular life and culture in New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that relatively brief period when Yiddish, the Jewish unions, and Jewish socialism flourished. He was also a prolific literary critic and professor of literature at a number of distinguished institutions of higher learning, a historian of the American left, and a key figure in bringing Yiddish literature to the attention of the English-speaking reader. Moreover, he was a public intellectual (a dying breed these days), a forceful advocate of anti-Stalinist socialism, and one of the major figures in the small but intriguing world of the post–World War II American left. Such a multifaceted and talented man clearly deserves a biography; Gerald Sorin is the second scholar to take up this task, the first having been Edward Alexander.1 Sorin does a solid and convincing job of chronicling Howe’s life and times. He has read just about everything that Howe wrote (quite an achievement), has interviewed many of his friends and adversaries in the rough-and-tumble world of the New York intelligentsia, and has put his correspondence to good use. He does not conceal his admiration for Howe, considering him to have been ‘‘one of the most important public thinkers in America, preeminent in three major fields of general interest: radical politics, literature, and Jewish culture’’ (p. ix). Howe, so we are told, was an ‘‘outstanding writer of literary and social criticism’’ (p. xi) and, although often irascible and unwilling to suffer fools gladly, and not always faithful to his wives, a real mensch (p. xiv). Throughout his career , Sorin believes, Howe (who died in 1993) remained committed to a secular version of the old Jewish ideal of mending the world (tikkun ‘olam). Sorin correctly sees Howe’s life as emblematic of an entire generation of brilliant and ambitious Jews of East European origin, almost all men, whose roots were in the working-class, Yiddish-speaking neighborhoods 1. See Edward Alexander, Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew (Bloomington, Ind., 1998). Alexander’s work is cited in Sorin’s bibliography, but he does not refer to it in the text. 720 JQR 94:4 (2004) of New York City, and whose talents enabled them to flourish in tolerant America. Much of Sorin’s book is taken up with charting the elaborate minuets danced by these engagé intellectuals as they formed and broke political alliances, defended or rejected Stalinism and Trotskyism, founded and abandoned various journals of left-wing opinion, and jockeyed for positions of influence. Anyone wishing to understand the ideological stances of the various journals Howe wrote for, such as Partisan Review, Dissent, and Commentary, and to follow Howe’s complicated relationships with such luminaries as Daniel Bell, Sidney Hook, Norman Podhoretz, Phillip Rahv, and William Phillips, will profit by reading this book. Sorin is a lucid guide to Howe’s views on the crucial issues of his time, including the nature of the Soviet Communist ‘‘experiment,’’ the civil rights movement , the new left, the Vietnam War, and the status of Israel. Indeed, all those interested in the most recent chapter in the history of the American left will find here much of interest. Sorin is by no means an uncritical admirer of his hero. Thus he tells us that ‘‘Howe was tolerant, perhaps too tolerant, of Norman Mailer,’’ since he did not take seriously enough Mailer’s cult of violence (p. 143). As for the famous quarrel between Howe and the black writer Ralph Ellison, Sorin thinks that Howe’s essay attacking Ellison for distancing himself from his own African American community was ‘‘misbegotten’’ (p. 192). Sorin also believes that Howe was overreacting when, as a member in good standing of the old left, he harshly criticized...

Jewish socialism in ottoman Salonica

The Socialist Workers’ Federation of Salonica was established, mostly by Salonican Jews, after the Young Turk revolution of 1908. The Federation was indeed unique in several respects and has attracted much attention from historians. However, in this article it is argued that this attention is disproportional to the Federation's actual influence on the corporate community structure of Salonican Jewry.

Jack London's women

At age twenty-three, Jack London (1876-1916) sold his first story, and within six years he was the highest paid and most widely read writer in America. To account for his success, he created a fiction of himself as the quintessential self-made man. But as Clarice Stasz demonstrates in this absorbing collective biography, London always relied on a circle of women who nurtured him, sheltered him, and fostered his legacy. Using newly available letters and diaries from private collections, Stasz brings this diverse constellation of women to life. London was the son of freethinking flora Wellman, yet found more maternal comfort from freed slave Jennie Prentiss and his stepsister Eliza. His early loves included a British-born consumptive, a Jewish socialist, and an African American. His first wife, Bess Maddern, was a teacher and devoted mother to daughters Bess and Joan, while his second wife, Charmian Kittredge, shared his passion for adventure and served as a model for many characters in his writings. Following his death, the various women who survived him both promoted his legacy and suffered the consequences of being constantly identified with a famous man. In recasting London's life through the eyes of three generations of women, Stasz manages to untangle his seemingly contradictory attitudes and actions. She also reveals the struggle that ensued, after his death, among family members and scholars over how he should be remembered. What emerges from this well-researched book is a new understanding of London and a compelling portrayal of the women who knew him best.

Such Stuff As Diaspora Dreams Are Made On: Birobidzhan and the Canadian-Jewish Communist Imagination

This article examines the history of two organizations whose main aim was to provide support for the Soviet project to establish a Jewish socialist republic, the official language of which was to be Yiddish, in the Birobidzhan region of the USSR. ICOR was founded in 1924 and was active within the Jewish, immigrant, working-class milieu; Ambijan, in Canada called the Canadian Birobidjan Committee, was formed in the United States in 1934. Both groups were ideologically and organizationally tied to the Communist Party of Canada and operated for some three decades. They became ideologically marginal and politically irrelevant during the Cold War, especially after the Birobidzhan project was exposed as largely fraudulent. Both groups disbanded in the 1950s.

Yellow marigolds for Ochun: An experiment in feminist ethnographic fiction

The following text is an extract from Nightgowns from Cuba, a novel-in-progress. The novel is a mix of autobiography, ethnography, and fiction. It examines the lives of three generations of women in a Jewish-Cuban family as seen from the perspective of an Afro-Cuban woman who was employed by the family as a domestic worker in the years before the Cuban revolution of 1959. The extract focuses on the delicate relationship that developed between Regla, the maid, and her employer Naomi, a Jewish immigrant and socialist from Poland, as the two women encountered each other in a small rural town in Cuba in the late 1930s. In the last section, Regla comments on the return to Cuba, in the 1990s, of Fanny, the granddaughter of Naomi, who is in search of her family's history and believes that Regla has access to memories that no one in her own family can pass on to her. The theme of the narrative is the transcultural exchange of stories between women and how memory travels and is conserved in strange and unexpected ways. The religion of Santeria is the cosmological setting of the story and the deity of Olokun, who inhabits the depths of the ocean and cannot be represented in visual form, haunts the narrative, which ties together Jewish-Cuban and Afro-Cuban histories and desires.

Irving Howe's "Margin of Hope": World of Our Fathers as Autobiography

World of Our Fathers, Irving Howe's monumental history of the of the East European Jews to America, and the life they found and made, was almost always characterized by reviewers, and even by Howe himself, as an elegy. This indefatigably researched, and beautifully written work was described time and time again as farewell with love and gratitude to Yiddish and Yiddishkeit, to Jewish socialism, to Jewish secularism generally.2 But World of Our Fathers is also something much larger and more complex than a mere death knell. It is a search for authentic, coherent, and enduring Jewish meaning in the collective experience of ordinary Jewish men and women. And with its sense of intimacy and personal relevance, it is Howe's true memoir, even more so than his intellectual autobiography A Margin of Hope (1982).3 Published in 1976 when Howe was fifty-six, World does not simply evoke and celebrate a lost culture, it represents the culmination of Howe's personal journey from youthful cosmopolitanism and revolu tionary internationalism in the late 1930s and 1940s to a reconquest of Jewishness by the i970s-a journey he took without ever abandoning his commitment to democratic radicalism. Indeed, despite what Howe has said and written both before and after the publication of World about the expiration of a recognizably Jewish culture in America, and the end of Jewish socialism and secularism, this book, his first and only

Grace Paley's Faith: The Journey Homeward, the Journey Forward

Grace Paley is steeped in traditions of community, social activism, and struggle for transformation. A descendant of East European Jewish socialist tradition, who developed as a writer in tumult of 1960s, Paley remains a political activist. Like her politics, often-noted power and charm of her literary voice is not merely a personal idiosyncrasy but derives from extensive roots. Her Yiddish heritage blends with urban dialect and African American inflections to create a quirky expressiveness, a cross-section of everchanging American language. These influences coalesce in prototypical ethnic mix of New York City, scene of a plethora of linguistic styles, an exotic territory familiarized through Paley's community of voices. urban milieu is crucial in portraying a Jewish American community branching out and cross-pollinating with peoples, creating a (post)modern multicultural persona. Simultaneously, Paley tests and refines Jewish American identity against African American experience. Black presence forces an engagement with past Jewish marginalization, calling into question a comfortable incorporation into mainstream America. American minority communities must define not just against a presumed American center but against each other. Americanization as simple assimilation into a preordained culture is revealed as untenable. The spatial topography of center and margin, Henry Louis Gates suggests, started to exhaust its usefulness in describing our own modernity (189). There is no stable framework into which one fits one's cultural patterns, but an everchanging aggregation in which various communities interrogate each in an incessant reshaping. Paley's New York is ideal setting for a (post)modern literature: polyglot, multilingual, interethnic. As early as 1924 Mikhail Bakhtin defined modern literature as surmounting limitations of earlier forms to create a dialogic blending. Monologism is pierced by a multiplicity of voices, an expanding variety of classes and backgrounds, so that the world becomes polyglot, once and for all and irreversibly. period of national languages, coexisting but closed and deaf to each other, comes to an end. Languages throw light on each other (Bakhtin 12). This view of literature as an instrument of change proves somewhat idealistic in practice. Bakhtin overlooks elite nature of institutions through which literature is transmitted; spectrum of voices is inevitably filtered through an educated class. From a position not only of difference but of power, privileged authors may choose to write across class and racial boundaries; their authority and authenticity, however, is problematic. posture of speaking for Other has long marked Jewish speakers and writers regarding African Americans; in Andrew Lakritz's terms such representations make risky incursions on uncommon grounds of groups that have not been accorded authority to speak for themselves (4). Speaking for another often leads to representing one's own concerns, distorting or even erasing that identity. So Michael Rogin argues that by adopting blackface guise, such Jewish figures as Al Jolson created as Americans through contrast with excluded Other. minstrel guise passed immigrants into Americans by differentiating them from black Americans through whom they spoke, who were not permitted to speak for themselves (Rogin 56). However most situations in which Jews attempt to represent or speak for African Americans are ambiguous, characterized by mixed motives and mixed results. In representing African American presence within a larger cultural imagination, Paley, despite her obvious sympathy with Black communities, ratifies and interrogates her own Jewish American identity. As she herself explains, if you speak for others--if you really perform that great social task . …

Anniversaries in Conflict: On the Centenary of the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund

ne hundred years ago, in the attic of a small house belonging to a poor workingman's family in Vilna, Lithuania, 13 men and women representing smallJewish socialist groups in Lithuania, Belorussia, and Poland met clandestinely for three days. Everyone in the group was in their twenties, but they all had years of conspiratorial experience behind them. At the end of the meeting, they issued a manifesto that proclaimed the formation of Der Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Rusland un Poyln (the Jewish Labor Union of Russia and Poland), known as the Bund.