A remarkable historical account of the lives and activities of members of the General Jewish Labour Bund, spanning decades and continents.

This ground-breaking history of the General Jewish Labour Bund investigates how the organisation transformed itself from a revolutionary protagonist in early twentieth-century Russia to a socialist institution of secular Jewish life and yidishkayt for Jews in North and South America.

In this multidisciplinary volume, leading historians provide new understanding of a time that sent shockwaves through Jewish communities in and beyond the Russian Empire and transformed the way Jews thought about the politics of ethnic and national identity.

During the era of Jewish mass migration from Eastern Europe (from the 1880s until the First World War), Switzerland played an important role in absorbing immigrants. Though located at the periphery of the main migration routes, the federal state with its liberal policies on foreigners became a key destination for students, revolutionaries, and travelers. The micro-studies and more general papers of this volume approach the topic in its transnational, local, linguistic, gendered, and ideological dimensions and from various disciplinary angles. They interweave and facilitate a novel take on the transitory spatial history and the Lebenswelt of East European Jews in Switzerland. Topics of this volume range – among others – from the location of Switzerland on the map of East European Jewish politics (Bundism, Socialism, Yiddishism, Zionism), conflicting performative cultures of Jewish and Russian revolutionaries, the Swiss Lehr- and Wanderjahre of the Jewish public intellectual Meir Wiener, the impact of Geneva on the Zionist Hebrew writer Ben Ami, the Russian-Jewish students’ colonies in Berne and Zurich and questions of individuals' integration and acculturation.

Bernard Goldstein’s memoir describes a hard world of taverns, toughs, thieves, and prostitutes; of slaughterhouse workers, handcart porters, and wagon drivers; and of fist-and gunfights with everyone from anti-Semites and Communists to hostile police, which is to say that it depicts a totally different view of life in prewar Poland than the one usually portrayed. As such, the book offers a corrective view in the form of social history, one that commands attention and demands respect for the vitality and activism of the generation of Polish Jews so brutally annihilated by the barbarism of the Nazis. In Warsaw, a city with over 300,000 Jews (one third of the population), Bernstein was the Jewish Labor Bund’s “enforcer,” organizer, and head of their militia—the one who carried out daily, on-the-street organization of unions; the fighting off of Communists, Polish anti-Semitic hooligans, and antagonistic police; marshaling and protecting demonstrations; and even settling family disputes, some of them arising from the new secular, socialist culture being fostered by the Bund. Goldstein’s is a portrait of tough Jews willing to do battle—worldly, modern individuals dedicated to their folk culture and the survival of their people. It delivers an unparalleled street-level view of vibrant Jewish life in Poland between the wars: of Jewish masses entering modern life, of Jewish workers fighting for their rights, of optimism, of greater assertiveness and self-confidence, of armed combat, and even of scenes depicting the seamy, semi-criminal elements. It provides a representation of life in Poland before the great catastrophe of World War II, a life of flowering literary activity, secular political journalism, successful political struggle, immersion in modern politics, fights for worker rights and benefits, a strong social-democratic labor movement, creation of a secular school system in Yiddish, and a youth movement that later provided the heroic fighters for the courageous Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The Jews of Pinsk is the most detailed and comprehensive history of a single Jewish community in any language. This second portion of this study focuses on Pinsk's turbulent final sixty years, showing the reality of life in this important, and in many ways representative, Eastern European Jewish community. From the 1905 Russian revolution through World War One and the long prologue to the Holocaust, the sweep of world history and the fate of this dynamic center of Jewish life were intertwined. Pinsk's role in the bloody aftermath of World War One is still the subject of scholarly debates: the murder of 35 Jewish men from Pinsk, many from its educated elite, provoked the American and British leaders to send emissaries to Pinsk. Shohet argues that the executions were a deliberate ploy by the Polish military and government to intimidate the Jewish population of the new Poland. Despite an increasingly hostile Polish state, Pinsk's Jews managed to maintain their community through the 1920s and 30s—until World War Two brought a grim Soviet interregnum succeeded by the entry of the Nazis on July 4th, 1941. For the first volume of this two-volume collection, see The Jews of Pinsk, 1506-1880 at www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=1442.

The Routledge History of Modern Latin American Migration offers a systematic account of population movements to and from the region over the last 150 years, spanning from the massive transoceanic migration of the 1870s to contemporary intraregional and transnational movements. The volume introduces the migratory trajectories of Latin American populations as a complex web of transnational movements linking origin, transit, and receiving countries. It showcases the historical mobility dynamics of different national groups including Arab, Asian, African, European, and indigenous migration and their divergent international trajectories within existing migration systems in the Western Hemisphere, including South America, the Caribbean, and Mesoamerica. The contributors explore some of the main causes for migration, including wars, economic dislocation, social immobility, environmental degradation, repression, and violence. Multiple case studies address critical contemporary topics such as the Venezuelan exodus, Central American migrant caravans, environmental migration, indigenous and gender migration, migrant religiosity, transit and return migration, urban labor markets, internal displacement, the nexus between organized crime and forced migration, the role of social media and new communication technologies, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on movement. These essays provide a comprehensive map of the historical evolution of migration in Latin America and contribute to define future challenges in migration studies in the region. This book will be of interest to scholars of Latin American and Migration Studies in the disciplines of history, sociology, political science, anthropology, and geography.