OUT NOW:

REVOLUTIONARY YIDDISHLAND: A HISTORY OF JEWISH RADICALISM

By Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klingberg

Translated by David Fernbach

 

"A rich and poignant and often enthralling record" – Noam Chomsky

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2277-revolutionary-yiddishland [1]

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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.

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"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 Sylvia
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

 

"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

 

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HARDBACK: OCTOBER 2016 / 320 PAGES / ISBN 9781784786083 / $24.95 / £16.99 /
$32.49CAN

 

AVAILABLE AS AN E-BOOK

 

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2277-revolutionary-yiddishland [2]

 

For more information on university inspection/desk copies
visit: http://www.versobooks.com/pg/desk-copies [3]

 

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