A Future Without Hate or Need: The Promise of the Jewish Left in Canada by Ester Reiter (review)

This is a study of the forging and flourishing of Jewish immigrant left culture in Canada beginning in the early 1920s, concluding with its decline (though not demise) following the dramatic revelation of the Soviet betrayal of the Jewish cause in 1956. The left secular culture had its origins in the breakdown of the traditional religious Jewish culture and of its attendant social structures within the communities of Eastern Europe, and in the mass migration to North America sparked by the pogroms and proletarianization of the Jewish masses. The newcomers to North America constructed a new secular identity based on the merging of Yiddish-based culture and politics.

The immigrants shared a common tradition, language, and familiarity with cultural and political references, the latter acquired during the politically tumultuous years leading to the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Significantly, the shared historical experience of Jewish Communists in the US and in Canada as an oppressed ethnic group and as an oppressed class defined their political struggle for liberation by addressing both dimensions of their identity. The unfolding events in the early years of the Soviet Union, where minorities' rights were recognized and Jewish theatres (Yiddish and Hebrew) and Yiddish literature flourished, were interpreted by many secular Jews as the fulfillment of their hopes. As Itche Goldberg, a well-known Yiddishist, Communist, and activist in both Canada and the US, affirmed in an interview with the author in 1996: "Jewish consciousness led us very naturally to the Soviet Union." (37)

The underlying assumption of the study of the Canadian left is the belief that communism held powerful appeal to a broad variety of Jewish political and cultural organizations albeit with varying degrees of acceptance of party dogma. In the words of the historians Matthew Hoffman and Henry Srebrnik, the Soviet Union was a "solar system" offering the possibility of belonging to the communist orbit without the obligations of strict loyalty to Moscow (Hoffman and Srebrnik, eds., A Vanished Ideology: Essays on the Jewish Communist Movement in the English-Speaking World in the Twentieth Century, [Albany: suny Press, 2016], 6). And, as Ester Reiter demonstrates, Jewish organizations inspired by communism were not always extensions of the Party. Rather, they were the products of historical and immigrant experience as "lived" in ethnic enclaves in the cities of North America. The common experience of working in the garment industry and participating in cultural institutions and organizations, some imported but others inspired by local conditions, contributed to the formation of organizations imbued with the spirit of solidarity and progressive ideologies independently of a communist dynamic.

The foundation of the culture was Yiddish, the workers' language. While Yiddish literature was a medium expressing and celebrating universalist concerns for social justice, the Jewish left did not abandon its particularistic Yiddish culture and concerns for national emancipation. This contradiction, when standards of communist dogma were applied, created tensions between the party, the leadership, and the rank and file. There were, for example, cases where a Jewish communist leadership, also known for its uncompromising attachment to Yiddish and Jewish culture, stood at the helm of organizations of non-communist rank-and-file membership being accused of negligence in exerting pressure on the grass roots to conform to the Moscow line. (In similar cases in New York, leadership resorted to quoting Lenin's definition of communist culture as "socialist in content and national in form" to smooth relations with the party at these moments of tension.) The variety of fraternal organizations rendered such demands mostly impractical. Thus, since broadly speaking, the non-aligned secular left played an important but self-driven role in the making of the left culture, the author pays attention to the varieties of socialists and other progressive groups, as well as communists. Importantly, however, she does not shy away from examining the realities of the relations with Moscow, especially in the years 1928 to 1935. She notes, for example, the...