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Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration The

This review summarizes the book "Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration: The Transnational History of the Jewish Labour Bund" by Frank Wolff. It discusses how the book focuses on the Jewish Labour Bund, a Marxist socialist party established in late 19th century Russia, and its members who emigrated to the United States and Argentina. Many former Bundists played influential roles in developing Jewish organizations and the American labor movement. Though the emigre Bund itself did not have lasting organizations, it inspired the growth of similar secondary Jewish groups. The book provides valuable insights into the social environment and legacy of Yiddish-speaking socialists in North America and Argentina over the past century.

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Maurici Farre
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246 views

Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration The

This review summarizes the book "Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration: The Transnational History of the Jewish Labour Bund" by Frank Wolff. It discusses how the book focuses on the Jewish Labour Bund, a Marxist socialist party established in late 19th century Russia, and its members who emigrated to the United States and Argentina. Many former Bundists played influential roles in developing Jewish organizations and the American labor movement. Though the emigre Bund itself did not have lasting organizations, it inspired the growth of similar secondary Jewish groups. The book provides valuable insights into the social environment and legacy of Yiddish-speaking socialists in North America and Argentina over the past century.

Uploaded by

Maurici Farre
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration: The Transnational

History of the Jewish Labour Bund by Frank Wolff (review)

Gennady Estraikh

American Jewish History, Volume 106, Number 2, April 2022, pp.


220-222 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article


https://muse.jhu.edu/article/879495

[ Access provided at 4 Feb 2023 21:10 GMT from New York University ]
220 AM ERIC AN JEWIS H H IS TO R Y

Ogren’s focus on the pre-revolutionary era is a needed addition to


the literature. Eran Shalev’s American Zion (2013) and James P. Byrd’s
Sacred Scripture, Sacred War (2013) both cover, among other topics, the
place of the Hebrew Bible amid the birth of the republic. Ogren reaches
back into the colonial period in a way that Shalev and Byrd do not. And
Ogren’s emphasis on Kabbalah is also new. His book thus provides a
valuable complement to William Pencak’s Jews and Gentiles in Early
America (2005), which does discuss the colonial era at some length but
is more attentive to Jews than to Judaism.
If pressed to quibble with Ogren’s excellent volume, I would take
issue with the title. Readers could be forgiven for assuming from the
cover that the pages to follow are principally concerned with Kabbalah’s
relationship to the founding of the United States in the 1770s. Yet this
monograph, as mentioned, is primarily preoccupied with colonial times.
Ogren offers only limited commentary on the years coinciding with Ameri-
can secession from the British Empire. He might have followed Pencak’s
lead by titling his book Kabbalah in Early America. This objection aside,
Ogren substantially enriches our insight into the kabbalistic currents that
coursed through colonial Protestantism. With the long-neglected role of
Kabbalah finally excavated, one wonders what other riches remain to be
unearthed about the Judaic dimensions of early American life.

Andrew Porwancher
University of Oklahoma

Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration: The Transnational History of the


Jewish Labour Bund. By Frank Wolff. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021.
xix + 512 pp.

The continuing economic development of Imperial Russia and the pre-


1880s state policy of “civilizing” Jewish subjects through luring them
into general education prepared ever larger numbers of Jews to give up
their traditional ways and live a life culturally compatible with that of
the urban Christian population. A very small minority even converted
to Christianity and thus emancipated themselves from the stifling legal
restrictions placed upon adherents of Judaism. However, hundreds of
the converts later officially returned to Judaism after realizing that con-
version did not alleviate the stigma of their origin. A new stratum of
Bo o k Rev iews 221

people, with one leg in traditional society and the other in the non-Jewish
world, arose in Russia. Not only state school and university graduates
steeped in Russian culture belonged to this stratum. The same or nearby
social space was populated by “semi-intelligentsia” (54). This snobby
tag described haphazardly educated autodidacts, many of them renegade
Talmudic students.
Yet secularized “conscious” or “enlightened” workers (soznatel’nye
rabochie in Russian, bavustzinike arbeter in Yiddish) formed the most
populous group of modernized Russian Jews. They, together with the
“semi-intelligentsia,” dominated the Jewish civil societal space, sand-
wiched between the traditional Jewish and the dominant Christian
societies. This space—distinct in its lifestyle, social organization, values,
and behavior—was an important recruiting ground for diverse political
and cultural movements and groupings, including the Jewish Labor Bund
established in 1897 by a group of Marxist secular socialists. Charac-
teristically, “workers often tended to retrospectively view joining the
workers’ movement as an act of conversion.” (210)
Judging by the level of literacy among Jews arriving in America, people
from the modernized groups played a more salient role among the im-
migrants than among those who stayed in Russia. Not only were they
more receptive to radical ideas, but they were also more mobile. Some
of them had to leave Russia fleeing persecutions and oppression, though
economic reasons for emigration prevailed. The book Yiddish Revolu-
tionaries in Migration, originally published in German in 2014 under the
title Neue Welten in der Neuen Welt: Die transnationale Geschichte des
Allgemeinen Jüdischen Arbeiterbundes, 1897-1947, focuses on one of the
cohorts in the Jewish civil societal space: members of the Bund, which
had grown into the largest among the Jewish, and generally one of the
most numerous, Marxist parties in imperial Russia. At the same time,
Russia is mainly a point of departure, because Frank Wolff is primarily
interested in what happened to and around the Bundists who chose or
had little choice but to emigrate to the United States and Argentina.
Although the émigré Bundists did not create any influential organiza-
tions of the Party’s members, they “inspired the rise of the powerful Jewish
organizations of secondary Bundism” (19). Indeed, such eminent figures
in the American labor movement as Baruch Charney Vladeck (1886-
1938), Sidney Hillman (1887-1946), and David Dubinsky (1892-1982)
were Bundists in their youth. Hillman’s brainchild, the Amalgamated
Bank, established in 1921, still exists as the largest union-owned bank.
Bundists became tone-setters in many American Jewish organizations,
including the Workmen’s Circle (now The Workers Circle), established
in 1900. Journalists with a Bundist pedigree played an important role
222 AM ERIC AN JEWIS H H IS TO R Y

in the Forverts (Forward), the biggest Yiddish newspaper. Although not


a few Bundists jumped on the communist bandwagon, others remained
in the circles of uncompromising anti-communist socialists. Many were
central in organizing and running Yiddish afternoon schools. A separate
study could be devoted to those Bundists who inherited or built successful
business enterprises and acted as generous sponsors of Yiddish cultural
and other projects. Among them were Motl Zelmanowicz (1914-2010),
the last president of the International Jewish Labor Bund, and Bono Wie-
ner (1920-1995), president of the Jewish Labour Bund in Melbourne.
Frank Wolff’s excellent, though structurally challenging, book contrib-
utes a great deal to our understanding of the social environment created
by Yiddish-speaking socialists in North America and Argentina. This
environment has changed significantly during the twelve decades of its
existence, but it still exists. Wolff mentions a claim by Daniel Katz, a
leading historian of the labor movement, that the key to understanding
Bernie Sanders can be found in the Yiddish current of socialism. This is
not a far-fetched claim by any means. Ideas of democratic social justice
live on among those who directly in their family or otherwise imbibed
a secondary or post-secondary east European Jewish socialist, including
Bundist, worldview.

Gennady Estraikh
New York University

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