Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism

by Alain Brossat, Sylvie Klingberg, David Fernbach (Translator)

Overview

Recovering the history of the revolutionary Jewish tradition

Jewish radicals manned the barricades on the avenues of Petrograd and the alleys of the Warsaw ghetto; they were in the vanguard of those resisting Franco and the Nazis. They originated in Yiddishland, a vast expanse of Eastern Europe that, before the Holocaust, ran from the Baltic Sea to the western edge of Russia and incorporated hundreds of Jewish communities with a combined population of some 11 million people. Within this territory, revolutionaries arose from the Jewish misery of Eastern and Central Europe; they were raised in the fear of God and taught to respect religious tradition, but were caught up in the great current of revolutionary utopian thinking. Socialists, Communists, Bundists, Zionists, Trotskyists, manual workers and intellectuals, they embodied the multifarious activity and radicalism of a Jewish working class that glimpsed the Messiah in the folds of the red flag.

Today, the world from which they came has disappeared, dismantled and destroyed by the Nazi genocide. After this irremediable break, there remain only survivors, and the work of memory for red Yiddishland. This book traces the struggles of these militants, their singular trajectories, their oscillation between great hope and doubt, their lost illusions—a red and Jewish gaze on the history of the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784786076
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	11/21/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	452,288
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Alain Brossat is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII and long-time activist. Sylvia Klingberg is a French sociologist.

Table of Contents

Preface to the 2009 Edition ix

Introduction 1

1 The Immense Pool of Human Tears 29

2 Rally Round Our Flag! 55

3 The Spanish Sky 95

4 Silent Starry Night 131

5 The Song of the Revolution Betrayed 177

6 I Am Tired of Defeats 241

Epilogue 283

Glossary 289

Bibliography 291

Index 295

Editorial Reviews

This rich and poignant and often enthralling record traces the Yiddishland revolutionaries from their East European roots through the years of hope and struggle and hideous crimes to the heroic anti-Nazi resistance and beyond, with fascinating asides on Spain and Palestine. There are many lessons for today, not least the significance of the lively interaction of revolutionary intellectuals and workers and the efforts to integrate the commitment to radical social and economic change with the formation of a Jewish identity that would break sharply from the stultifying tradition and open the way to the aspirations of the Jewish workers’ movement that was at the forefront of revolutionary struggle from its earliest days.”
—Noam Chomsky

“Could there have been a future for pre-war Jewry in which Israel did not exist and Jews were gathered in a nation state within a federated Soviet Union? This is one of the questions brought up in Alain Brossat and Sylvie Klingberg’s book … There is hope for the spirit and aims behind the stories this book tells. Jewish radicalism did not die out in 1942 with the Final Solution. It now expresses itself without Yiddish.”
—Clive Bloom, Times Higher Education

“A fascinating window onto a lost world … essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the complex relationship between the Jewish left, the general left, and Zionism. The gripping testimonies collected in these pages give the lie to the idea that Jews in the Shoah went like sheep to the slaughter. Brossat and Klingberg do not try to iron out the wrinkles of the past. Their insightful commentary illuminates the passions, paradoxes, triumphs and defeats of the witnesses who populate their book.”
—Brian Klug, author of Being Jewish and Doing Justice

“Nowadays we know more and more about the Nazi Genocide. Unfortunately, we have much less knowledge about the everyday life which preceded the horror and was so brutally terminated. For opening up this world we must praise Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klinberg for their vital new book, Revolutionary Yiddishland. Here, life is given priority to death, and the struggles of so many in the Yiddishland allow us to see past the catastrophes.”
—Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People

“Brossat and Klingberg’s book is a memorial to a missing world. As an aesthetic composition, it is beautiful.”
—Max Ajl, Mondoweiss

“Altogether, Revolutionary Yiddishland is a thoroughly engaging read. It’s an important historical document preserving the memory of this radical period of Jewish and European history.”
—Haaretz

“Its impact on me was immense. I devoured it; my political horizons radically expanded. Not only, I came to realise, was there no contradiction between Judaism, socialism and internationalism, but, until the Nazi genocide, they existed in a profoundly interrelated way.”
—Sai Englert, Salvage

“An eye-opening oral history.”
—Gabriel Levy, author of Judaic Technologies of the World

“A haunting, inspiring and often tragic book, Revolutionary Yiddishland uses first-hand interviews, deep archival research and sharp analysis to bring to life a complex landscape of factory workers, partisans, poets, party leaders, refugees, ghetto fighters and movement intellectuals.”
—Ben Lorber, In These Times

“An absorbing oral history … Revolutionary Yiddishland provides fascinating insight into a relatively unknown part of Jewish history.”
—Giulia Miller, History Today

“A spirited and politically engaged study of the lives and ideas of mid–twentieth-century Jewish revolutionaries … and a rich source for Jewish social history and for the history of the subalterns of the Jewish left in the twentieth century.”
—H-Net Judaic

From the Publisher

09/12/2016
Despite the implied scope of the book’s subtitle, Brossat and Klingberg are only interested in considering early 20th-century European Jewish leftists. Those individuals, and the movements that spawned them (such as the Bund), certainly merit study, but this analysis is a jargon-laden polemic. Neither author is trained as a historian, and they both rely on oral histories while providing little context by which to assess their reliability. Terminology will also be an obstacle for some, as when the authors broadly define communism as “the word used for politics with the ambition to establish social justice and apply egalitarian principles.” Brossat and Klingberg are not bashful about stating their own perspectives, noting in their introduction that “we did not conduct our interviews as journalists, as curious bystanders, but above all as militants of the same utopia as that which took them so high and so low.” This pervasive bias is a major negative; statements such as, “The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, as the Zionists never tire of repeating, leaned ever more to the side of Hitler’s Germany,” are gratuitous editorializing that only detracts from the authors’ points. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly