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.