Bundist Legacy After The Second World War

Bundist Legacy after the Second World War offers an account on post-war Jewish Bund. The volume is one of the first attempts to answer this crucial existential and political question on the “making” of a new identity.

"While contributors to The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics debate the ultimate success and failure of the various parties and the appropriateness of their tactics, inevitably most examine such issues through the prism of the Holocaust, which effectively terminated East European Jewish politics. These essays also raise the issue of whether ethnic minorities are best served by highly ideological or highly pragmatic political movements in trying to defend their interests in nondemocratic, multiethnic states."--BOOK JACKET.

This Handbook, the first of its kind, provides an in- depth examination of the evolution, ideology, history and culture of Zionism and its various movements. Distancing itself from the slogans and cliches of advocacy, the volume provides much-needed context and background on the emergence of Zionism. The Handbook is divided into eight parts – with contributions from some forty of the world’s leading scholars on Zionism –to elucidate its various strands. These include underrepresented areas such as Zionism in the Arab World before the establishment of the State of Israel, Zionism and Marxism, the emergence of the Zionist Right, the language war between Hebrew and Yiddish, the struggle for Jewish women’s suffrage, the poetry of Lea Goldberg, and Zionism in emerging new Jewish communities in locations like Papua New Guinea, Guatemala and Zimbabwe. Another section on Zionism in repressive states stretches from an examination of Zionism in Hitler’s Germany to the Ayatollahs’ Iran today; from subterranean Zionism in Stalin’s Russia to apartheid South Africa. The volume concludes by examining current issues, including the relationship between evangelicals and Zionism in the US, and the representation of Zionism in the age of the internet. Providing a sweeping overview of Zionism in its many forms, the volume will appeal to students, researchers and general readers interested in Jewish studies in the Middle East and beyond, as well as those seeking to understand the roots of contemporary Israel.

Explores the long history of anti-Zionist and non-Zionist American Jews Throughout the twentieth century, American Jewish communal leaders projected a unified position of unconditional support for Israel, cementing it as a cornerstone of American Jewish identity. This unwavering position served to marginalize and label dissenters as antisemitic, systematically limiting the threshold of acceptable criticism. In pursuit of this forced consensus, these leaders entered Cold War alliances, distanced themselves from progressive civil rights and anti-colonial movements, and turned a blind eye to human rights abuses in Israel. In The Threshold of Dissent, Marjorie N. Feld instead shows that today’s vociferous arguments among American Jews over Israel and Zionism are but the newest chapter in a fraught history that stretches from the nineteenth century. Drawing on rich archival research and examining wide-ranging intellectual currents—from the Reform movement and the Yiddish left to anti-colonialism and Jewish feminism—Feld explores American Jewish critics of Zionism and Israel from the 1880s to the 1980s. The book argues that the tireless policing of contrary perspectives led each generation of dissenters to believe that it was the first to question unqualified support for Israel. The Threshold of Dissent positions contemporary critics within a century-long debate about the priorities of the American Jewish community, one which holds profound implications for inclusion in American Jewish communal life and for American Jews’ participation in coalitions working for justice. At a time when American Jewish support for Israel has been diminishing, The Threshold of Dissent uncovers a deeper—and deeply contested—history of intracommunal debate over Zionism among American Jews.

Finalist for National Jewish Book Award for Writing Based on Archival Material 2022. Jewish political and cultural behaviour during the first half of the twentieth century comes to the fore in this portrayal of a forgotten movement with contemporary relevance. Commencing with the Zionist rejection of the Uganda proposal in 1905, the Jewish Territorialist Movement searched for areas outside Palestine in which to create settlements of Jews. This study analyses the Territorialists’ ideology and activities in the Jewish context of the time, but their thought and discourse also reflect geopolitical concerns that still have resonance today in debates about colonialist attitudes to peoplehood, territory, and space. As the colonial world order rapidly changed after 1945, the Territorialists did not abandon their aspirations in overseas lands. Instead, in their attempts to find settlement solutions for Europe’s ‘surplus’ Jews, they moved from negotiating predominantly with the European colonizers to negotiating also with the ever more powerful non-Western leaders of decolonizing nations. This book reconstructs the rich history of the activities and changing ideologies of Jewish Territorialism, represented by Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Territorial Organisation (the ITO) and, later, by the Freeland League for Jewish Colonization under the leadership of Isaac Steinberg. Via Uganda, Angola, Madagascar, Australia, and Suriname, this story eventually leads us to questions about yidishkeyt, and to forgotten early twentieth-century ideas of how to be Jewish.

In the decades directly following the Holocaust, American Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture, fearful that growing affluence and suburbanization threatened the future of Jewish life. Many communal educators and rabbis contended that without educational interventions, Judaism as they understood it would disappear altogether. They pinned their hopes on residential summer camps for Jewish youth: institutions that sprang up across the U.S. in the postwar decades as places for children and teenagers to socialize, recreate, and experience Jewish culture. Adults' fears, hopes, and dreams about the Jewish future inflected every element of camp life, from the languages they taught to what was encouraged romantically and permitted sexually. But adult plans did not constitute everything that occurred at camp: children and teenagers also shaped these sleepaway camps to mirror their own desires and interests and decided whether to accept or resist the ideas and ideologies their camp leaders promoted. Focusing on the lived experience of campers and camp counselors, The Jews of Summer demonstrates how a cultural crisis birthed a rite of passage that remains a significant influence in American Jewish life.

While the role the United States played in France's liberation from Nazi Germany is widely celebrated, it is less well known that American Jewish individuals and organizations mobilized to reconstruct Jewish life in France after the Holocaust. In A "Jewish Marshall Plan," Laura Hobson Faure explores how American Jews committed themselves and hundreds of millions of dollars to bring much needed aid to their French coreligionists. Hobson Faure sheds light on American Jewish chaplains, members of the Armed Forces, and those involved with Jewish philanthropic organizations who sought out Jewish survivors and became deeply entangled with the communities they helped to rebuild. While well intentioned, their actions did not always meet the needs and desires of the French Jews. A "Jewish Marshall Plan" examines the complex interactions, exchanges, and solidarities created between American and French Jews following the Holocaust. Challenging the assumption that French Jews were passive recipients of aid, this work reveals their work as active partners who negotiated their own role in the reconstruction process.

This volume describes the various movements and parties, across all six continents, that wanted social change through state transformation. It begins with a reconstruction of social democracy's trajectories from the 1870s until the present. The evolution of socialism on different continents is illustrated through a number of national case studies. Experiments at a subnational level (for example, municipal socialism) are also explored, as are the varying experiences of international umbrella organizations. The next part focuses on divergent socialist experiments and ideologies in several parts of the world, including South Asia, Africa, the Arab world, Brazil, Venezuela, and Israel/Palestine, followed by an overview of 'independent' socialist movements, including left-socialist parties of the 1930s and the post-war period, and the global New Left since its beginnings in the 1950s. The volume concludes with critical essays on socialism's long-term and global development.