Leadership and Control Within an American Jewish Communist Front: The Case of the ICOR

The Jewish Communist movement in the United States consisted of various groups which championed the goals of the Soviet Union. One such organization was the ICOR; while it involved itself in the various struggles of the Communist left, its main aim was to provide support for the Soviet project to establish a Jewish socialist republic in Birobidzhan. By the mid-1930s it claimed a membership of 11,000, mainly first- and second-generation Yiddish-speaking Jews of east European origin, and it had become a tangible presence in the Jewish community. The ICOR's decision-making structure was organized along Communist lines, and its allegiance to that ideology placed limits on its freedom of manoeuvre. Hence its leadership pursued an agenda ultimately shaped by non-Jewish concerns, and the organization collapsed soon after the onset of the Cold War and the exposure of the Birobidzhan scheme as largely fraudulent.