Overview

Winner of the 2013 New York Book Show Award in Scholarly/Professional Cover Design Jewish Radicals explores the intertwined histories of Jews and the American Left through a rich variety of primary documents. Written in English and Yiddish, these documents reflect the entire spectrum of radical opinion, from anarchism to social democracy, Communism to socialist-Zionism. Rank-and-file activists, organizational leaders, intellectuals, and commentators, from within the Jewish community and beyond, all have their say. Their stories crisscross the Atlantic, spanning from the United States to Europe and British-ruled Palestine. The documents illuminate in fascinating detail the efforts of large numbers of Jews to refashion themselves as they confronted major problems of the twentieth century: poverty, anti-semitism, the meaning of American national identity, war, and totalitarianism. In this comprehensive sourcebook, the story of Jewish radicals over seven decades is told for the first time in their own words.

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9780814757444

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Kidada Williams's They Left Great Marks on Me is an impressive and important contribution to our understanding of African American life after the Civil War. Whereas most previous scholars utilized the records of the Freedmen's Bureau and other agencies to document the causes, characteristics, and extent of anti-black violence during the postebellum period, Ms. Williams focuses on the importance of the testimony itself, especially to the African Americans who were brave enough to provide such testimony in the hostile environment of the era. She convincingly argues that this act of testifying itself was one of the galvanizing forces for the movement that eventually produced a host of civil rights activists at the turn of the twentieth century. While lifting up the transformative power of public testimony, Ms. Williams also helps re-center the discussion of white-on-black violence in the late nineteenth century, which all too often focuses on the most spectacular form of violence durin

"""This book will stimulate the mind and gladden the heart of anyone who cares about the history of American Jews or the American left and the always close, if eternally tempestuous relationship between them. Tony Michels has assembled a feast of documents and is an expert guide to their meaning and context."" Michael Kazin, author of American Dreamers ""From America's leading historian of Yiddish-speaking radicalism comes this rich anthology of contemporary Jewish-American voices from the 1880s through the 1940s. Among the diverse experiences and points of view reflected here, Michels convincingly identifies three dominant threads --socialist awakening as a rite-of-passage, the agony and ecstasy of political struggle, and Yiddish-based education as a labor-centered project with an uncertain agenda for national emancipation."" Leon Fink, editor of Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas"

Author Information

Tony Michels is George L. Mosse Associate Professor of American Jewish History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (2005).

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