4.0
Revolutionary Yiddishland
ByPublisher Description
This “rich and poignant” history traces Jewish radicals from their Eastern European roots through years of hope, Nazi resistance, and beyond—“with fascinating asides on Spain and Palestine” (Noam Chomsky).
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 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 20th century.
“Nowadays we know more and more about the Nazi Genocide . . . we have much less knowledge about the everyday life which preceded the horror and was so brutally terminated.” —Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People
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 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 20th century.
“Nowadays we know more and more about the Nazi Genocide . . . we have much less knowledge about the everyday life which preceded the horror and was so brutally terminated.” —Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesRevolutionary Yiddishland Reviews
4.0
“Really good, very dense. Learned a lot”
“The book does a decent job at directly counter-acting mainstream narratives on European Jewry: that they were a weak, humiliated people who suffered in silence until empowered by the establishment of the Zionist entity.
Otherwise, lots of weaknesses. For one, the author doesn't shy away from conveying their anti-Stalinist bias. It shapes the chronology of the book's events, and it also shapes the negative sentiment expressed towards Jewish life in the USSR. I would have taken it if it weren't for his faulty historical sourcing. The few sources used were eyewitness testimonies, all of whom ended up in occupied Palestine. None of the eyewitnesses were Bundists or Poale Zion militants or whathaveyou who ended up elsewhere (America, France, England, South Africa, etc.) All the eyewitnesses were lukewarm about Zionism at best, completely having accepted it for the most part (which the author runs into lengthy rationalisations of in the last chapter titled "I am Tired of Defeats"). How is this in any way reliable? Speaking of Palestinians as "Arabs," and painting involvement with Egyptian and Syrian communists as similarly being involved with "Arabs" was symptomatic of a complete lack of critical engagement with Zionist racism towards different Middle Eastern peoples. Add onto that him flat-out stating his stance of settlers being rooted residents of the land of Palestine...clearly he didn't do enough research on settlement in occupied Palestine and the strong links that settlers maintain abroad. Once again, it undermines the quality of the book.
All in all, it's a solid attempt at reconstructing Yiddish leftism in Europe, and I would hesitantly recommend the book solely because there is not much literarure that redresses static, pretty ahistorical and Zionist-led narratives of Jewish resistance movements in modern Europe, particularly during the Shoah.”
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