Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration: The Transnational History of the Jewish Labour Bund by Frank Wolff (review)

The continuing economic development of Imperial Russia and the pre-1880s state policy of "civilizing" Jewish subjects through luring them into general education prepared ever larger numbers of Jews to give up their traditional ways and live a life culturally compatible with that of the urban Christian population. A very small minority even converted to Christianity and thus emancipated themselves from the stifling legal restrictions placed upon adherents of Judaism. However, hundreds of the converts later officially returned to Judaism after realizing that conversion did not alleviate the stigma of their origin. A new stratum of people, with one leg in traditional society and the other in the non-Jewish world, arose in Russia. Not only state school and university graduates steeped in Russian culture belonged to this stratum. The same or nearby social space was populated by "semi-intelligentsia" (54). This snobby tag described haphazardly educated autodidacts, many of them renegade Talmudic students.

Yet secularized "conscious" or "enlightened" workers (soznatel'nye rabochie in Russian, bavustzinike arbeter in Yiddish) formed the most populous group of modernized Russian Jews. They, together with the "semi-intelligentsia," dominated the Jewish civil societal space, sandwiched between the traditional Jewish and the dominant Christian societies. This space—distinct in its lifestyle, social organization, values, and behavior—was an important recruiting ground for diverse political and cultural movements and groupings, including the Jewish Labor Bund established in 1897 by a group of Marxist secular socialists. Characteristically, "workers often tended to retrospectively view joining the workers' movement as an act of conversion." (210)

Judging by the level of literacy among Jews arriving in America, people from the modernized groups played a more salient role among the immigrants than among those who stayed in Russia. Not only were they more receptive to radical ideas, but they were also more mobile. Some of them had to leave Russia fleeing persecutions and oppression, though economic reasons for emigration prevailed. The book Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration, originally published in German in 2014 under the title Neue Welten in der Neuen Welt: Die transnationale Geschichte des Allgemeinen Jüdischen Arbeiterbundes, 1897-1947, focuses on one of the cohorts in the Jewish civil societal space: members of the Bund, which had grown into the largest among the Jewish, and generally one of the most numerous, Marxist parties in imperial Russia. At the same time, Russia is mainly a point of departure, because Frank Wolff is primarily interested in what happened to and around the Bundists who chose or had little choice but to emigrate to the United States and Argentina.

Although the émigré Bundists did not create any influential organizations of the Party's members, they "inspired the rise of the powerful Jewish organizations of secondary Bundism" (19). Indeed, such eminent figures in the American labor movement as Baruch Charney Vladeck (1886-1938), Sidney Hillman (1887-1946), and David Dubinsky (1892-1982) were Bundists in their youth. Hillman's brainchild, the Amalgamated Bank, established in 1921, still exists as the largest union-owned bank. Bundists became tone-setters in many American Jewish organizations, including the Workmen's Circle (now The Workers Circle), established in 1900. Journalists with a Bundist pedigree played an important role in the Forverts (Forward), the biggest Yiddish newspaper. Although not a few Bundists jumped on the communist bandwagon, others remained in the circles of uncompromising anti-communist socialists. Many were central in organizing and running Yiddish afternoon schools. A separate study could be devoted to those Bundists who inherited or built successful business enterprises and acted as generous sponsors of Yiddish cultural and other projects. Among them were Motl Zelmanowicz (1914-2010), the last president of the International Jewish Labor Bund, and Bono Wiener (1920-1995), president of the Jewish Labour Bund in Melbourne.

Frank Wolff's excellent, though structurally challenging, book contributes a great deal to our understanding of the social environment created by Yiddish-speaking socialists in North...