Class Struggle And The Jewish Nation

This volume contains the first broad selection of essays made available in English by Ber Borochov, one of the leading intellectuals of the early Zionist movement. Borochov founded the Labor Zionist party in 1906, and was the pillar of the Israeli Labor party from whose ranks arose such figures as David Ben-Gurion and Itzhak Ben-Tsvi. He is best remembered for his ability to synthesize socialism and nationalism.Borochov argues that early Marxist theory failed to understand the causes of nationalism and views it only as a temporary phenomenon. Borochov tried to synthesize socialism with Jewish nationalism. Zionism was a movement necessary to free oppressed Eastern European Jews and permit them to further socialist ideals in their own nation-state. The dilemma is that socialist internationalism requires national culture to be of no further value once a socialist victory occurs in a country. Borochov's essays provide an important, if largely unknown perspective on these questions.

This volume contains the first broad selection of essays made available in English by Ber Borochov, one of the leading intellectuals of the early Zionist movement. Borochov founded the Labor Zionist party in 1906, and was the pillar of the Israeli Labor party from whose ranks arose such figures as David Ben-Gurion and Itzhak Ben-Tsvi. He is best remembered for his ability to synthesize socialism and nationalism.Borochov argues that early Marxist theory failed to understand the causes of nationalism and views it only as a temporary phenomenon. Borochov tried to synthesize socialism with Jewish nationalism. Zionism was a movement necessary to free oppressed Eastern European Jews and permit them to further socialist ideals in their own nation-state. The dilemma is that socialist internationalism requires national culture to be of no further value once a socialist victory occurs in a country. Borochov's essays provide an important, if largely unknown perspective on these questions.

Gift of Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut.

"The National Question and the Class Struggle" from Dov Ber Borochov. Marxist-Zionist writer and leader (1881-1917).

Dr Mendelsohn analyses the nature and condition of the Russian Jewish proletariat and the Jewish labour movement.

This important new study of Palestine in the years 1882 to 1948 looks at the formation of the Jewish working class and its pivotal and deliberate role in the forging of a nation. Drawing on historical studies as well as neo-Marxist theory, Professor Ben-Porat adds both empirical information and new critical perspectives to our understanding of class formation and of the unique historical circumstances attendant on the creation of modern Israel.

In The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate, Enzo Traverso analyses an intellectual controversy that runs over more than a century, between Jewish emancipation and the Holocaust, between Marx and the Frankfurt School, stressing both its achievements and its limits.

The Tragedy of a Generation is the story of the rise and fall of an ideal: an autonomous Jewish nation in Europe. It traces the origins of two influential but overlooked strains of Jewish thought—Yiddishism and Diaspora Nationalism—and documents the waning hopes and painful reassessments of their leading representatives against the rising tide of Nazism and, later, the Holocaust. Joshua M. Karlip presents three figures—Elias Tcherikower, Yisroel Efroikin, and Zelig Kalmanovitch—seen through the lens of Imperial Russia on the brink of revolution. Leaders in the struggle for recognition of the Jewish people as a national entity, these men would prove instrumental in formulating the politics of Diaspora Nationalism, a middle path that rejected both the Zionist emphasis on Palestine and the Marxist faith in class struggle. Closely allied with this ideology was Yiddishism, a movement whose adherents envisioned the Yiddish language and culture, not religious tradition, as the unifying force of Jewish identity. We follow Tcherikower, Efroikin, and Kalmanovitch as they navigate the tumultuous early decades of the twentieth century in pursuit of a Jewish national renaissance in Eastern Europe. Correcting the misconception of Yiddishism as a radically secular movement, Karlip uncovers surprising confluences between Judaism and the avowedly nonreligious forms of Jewish nationalism. An essential contribution to Jewish historiography, The Tragedy of a Generation is a probing and poignant chronicle of lives shaped by ideological conviction and tested to the limits by historical crisis.