After the khurbn (destruction) perpetrated by Nazi Germany, its allies, and collaborators, the Yiddish communities in Eastern Europe were shattered and largely decimated. For most survivors, the old homeland in the East was a lost place of longing and a place of mere transit to the centers of the reconfiguring ‘West’: in North America, the global South, and the young state of Israel. Research has for the most part ignored the cultural activities, the political engagement, and the diverse visions of those cultural activists who remained in Eastern Europe in their thousands. This volume examines their activities as well as the role of and language policy regarding Yiddish in various socialist states, as well as trans-socialist and cross-bloc dialogues during the "Yiddish Cold War." How did the actors position themselves within socialist narratives of the past, present, and future and vis-à-vis the Jewish diasporas? What were their visions for Yiddishlands in the new world of really-existing socialism and how did they attempt to implement them? In this volume, case studies on Poland, the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, and Romania uncover diverse cultural reconstruction initiatives and cross-bloc entanglements with ‘Western’ countries, such as Great Britain, the United States, Argentina, and Israel.

In a compelling history of the Jewish community in New York during four decades of mass immigration, Tony Michels examines the defining role of the Yiddish socialist movement in the American Jewish experience. The movement, founded in the 1880s, was dominated by Russian-speaking intellectuals, including Abraham Cahan, Mikhail Zametkin, and Chaim Zhitlovsky. Socialist leaders quickly found Yiddish essential to convey their message to the Jewish immigrant community, and they developed a remarkable public culture through lectures and social events, workers' education societies, Yiddish schools, and a press that found its strongest voice in the mass-circulation newspaper Forverts. Arguing against the view that socialism and Yiddish culture arrived as Old World holdovers, Michels demonstrates that they arose in New York in response to local conditions and thrived not despite Americanization, but because of it. And the influence of the movement swirled far beyond the Lower East Side, to a transnational culture in which individuals, ideas, and institutions crossed the Atlantic. New York Jews, in the beginning, exported Yiddish socialism to Russia, not the other way around. The Yiddish socialist movement shaped Jewish communities across the United States well into the twentieth century and left an important political legacy that extends to the rise of neoconservatism. A story of hopeful successes and bitter disappointments, A Fire in Their Hearts brings to vivid life this formative period for American Jews and the American left.

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.

In 1928 the Soviet Union proposed the establishment of an autonomous socialist Jewish republic in the far eastern reaches of Russian territory. In Birobidzhan the eternal search for a Jewish homeland would be realized and Jews would possess their own institutions, which would function in Yiddish. A "new" Jew would be created, emancipated, and rejuvenated. Although the project was eventually revealed to be a fraud, thousands of left-wing Jews in Canada and the United States passionately supported it and campaigned on its behalf - some even emigrated to Birobidzhan. The Canadian Jewish Communist movement, an influential ideological voice within the Canadian left, played a major role in the politics of Jewish communities in cities such as Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg, as well as many smaller centres, between the 1920s and the 1950s. Jerusalem on the Amur looks at the interlocking group of left-wing Jewish organizations that shared the political views of the Canadian Communist Party and were vocal proponents of policies perceived as beneficial to the Jewish working class. Focusing on the Association for Jewish Colonization in Russia, known by its transliterated acronym as the ICOR, and the Canadian Ambijan Committee, Henry Srebrnik uses Yiddish-language books, newspapers, pamphlets, and other materials to trace the ideological and material support provided by the Canadian Jewish Communist movement to Birobidzhan. By providing the first account of the rise and fall of Communism in the Jewish community of Canada, Jerusalem on the Amur makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century Jewish life.

Yiddish Paris explores how Yiddish-speaking emigrants from Eastern Europe in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s created a Yiddish diaspora nation in Western Europe and how they presented that nation to themselves and to others in France. In this meticulously researched and first full-length study of interwar Yiddish culture in France, author Nicholas Underwood argues that the emergence of a Yiddish Paris was depended on "culture makers," mostly left-wing Jews from Socialist and Communist backgrounds who created cultural and scholarly organizations and institutions, including the French branch of YIVO (a research institution focused on East European Jews), theater troupes, choruses, and a pavilion at the Paris World's Fair of 1937. Yiddish Paris examines how these left-wing Yiddish-speaking Jews insisted that even in France, a country known for demanding the assimilation of immigrant and minority groups, they could remain a distinct group, part of a transnational Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation. Yet, in the process, they in fact created a French-inflected version of Jewish diaspora nationalism, finding allies among French intellectuals, largely on the left.

Part travelogue, part social history, and part family saga, this book investigates the politics of heritage tourism and collective memory. Acclaimed historian Daniel J. Walkowitz visits key Jewish heritage sites from Berlin to Belgrade to Warsaw to New York to discover which stories of the Jewish experience get told and which get silenced.

This book takes a timely look at histories of radical Jewish movements, their modes of Holocaust memorialisation, and their relationships with broader anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles. Its primary focus is Australia, where Jewish antifascism was a major political and cultural force in Jewish communities in the 1940s and early 1950s. This cultural and intellectual history of Jewish antifascism utilises a transnational lens to provide an exploration of a Jewish antifascist ideology that took hold in the middle of the twentieth century across Jewish communities worldwide. It argues that Jewish antifascism offered an alternate path for Jewish politics that was foreclosed by mutually reinforcing ideologies of settler colonialism, both in Palestine and Australia.