The Radical Jewish Tradition recovers a neglected and suppressed history of Jewish resistance to oppression. Collected here are stories of heroism and selflessness that trace their origins to resistance against the nineteenth-century Tsarist Empire. These radical Jews-most of them working class-found common cause with other oppressed groups. They refused to be defined as victims.This inspiring tradition was ultimately checked by the callous indifference of capitalist governments to refugees before the Second World War and to the Holocaust. Donny Gluckstein and Janey Stone revive this history for the benefit of a world in crisis. They consider this legacy and its impact on modern Jewish identity. At a time when a bellicose Israeli government claims to represent Jews the world over, the history of these radicals bursts the constraints placed on the historical imagination.Here is a story central to the socialist movement as well as an object lesson for all those struggling to resist.
The Radical Jewish Tradition recovers a neglected and suppressed history of Jewish resistance to oppression. Collected here are sto,ries of heroism and selflessness that trace their origins to resis,tance against the nineteenth-century Tsarist Empire. These radical Jews-most of them working class-found common cause with oth,er oppressed groups. They refused to be defined as victims.This inspiring tradition was ultimately checked by the callous indif,ference of capitalist governments to refugees before the Second World War and to the Holocaust. Donny Gluckstein and Janey Stone revive this history for the benefit of a world in crisis. They consider this legacy and its impact on modern Jewish identity. At a time when a bellicose Israeli government claims to represent Jews the world over, the history of these radicals bursts the constraints placed on the historical imagination.Here is a story central to the socialist movement as well as an ob,ject lesson for all those struggling to resist.
The claim of Israel and its apologists to represent Jews everywhere, the growth of the antisemitic far right, and the approach of the left to the Jewish question, are central issues today. A knowledge of the role of Jews in the past aids understanding of these debates. This book recovers some of that long-neglected history. Before the Second World War the majority of Jews were working class and part of a wider struggle alongside their non-Jewish comrades on the left. The book celebrates Jewish radicalism from the Tsarist Empire to Poland and Germany, from London to New York. To illuminate this background the issue of Jewish identity is analysed along political, cultural, and sociological lines. Fighting oppression and exploitation took numerous political forms, including left Zionism, Bundism and revolutionary Marxism. Far from the Zionist stereotype of the ultimate victims, Jews were revolutionaries, resistance fighters and firebrands. This inspiring radical tradition was ultimately checked by the callous indifference of capitalist governments to refugees and the horror of Auschwitz. However, its lessons must be passed on to inform working class and anti-imperialist struggles in a world in crisis.