Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland

Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland PDF Author: Jack Jacobs
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815632269
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
In the years between the two world wars, the Jewish community of Poland—the largest in Europe—was the cultural heart of the Jewish diaspora. The Jewish Workers’ Bund, which had a socialist, secularist, Yiddishist, and anti-Zionist orientation, won a series of important electoral battles in Poland on the eve of the Second World War and became a major political party. Many earlier works on the politics of Polish Jewry have suggested that Bundist victories were ephemeral or attributable to outside forces. Jack Jacobs, however, argues convincingly that the electoral success of the Bund was linked to the long-term efforts of the constellation of cultural, educational, and other movements revolving around the party. The Bundist movements for children, youth, and women, and for physical education offered highly innovative programs and promoted countercultural values. Drawing on meticulously researched archival materials, Jacobs shows how the development of these programs—such as a program to provide sex education to working-class Jewish youth—translated into a stronger, more robust party. At the same time, he suggests the Bund’s limitations, highlighting its failed women’s movement. Jacobs provides a fascinating account of Bundist movements and a thoughtful revision to the accepted view.

Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland

Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland PDF Author: Jack Jacobs
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815632269
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the years between the two world wars, the Jewish community of Poland—the largest in Europe—was the cultural heart of the Jewish diaspora. The Jewish Workers’ Bund, which had a socialist, secularist, Yiddishist, and anti-Zionist orientation, won a series of important electoral battles in Poland on the eve of the Second World War and became a major political party. Many earlier works on the politics of Polish Jewry have suggested that Bundist victories were ephemeral or attributable to outside forces. Jack Jacobs, however, argues convincingly that the electoral success of the Bund was linked to the long-term efforts of the constellation of cultural, educational, and other movements revolving around the party. The Bundist movements for children, youth, and women, and for physical education offered highly innovative programs and promoted countercultural values. Drawing on meticulously researched archival materials, Jacobs shows how the development of these programs—such as a program to provide sex education to working-class Jewish youth—translated into a stronger, more robust party. At the same time, he suggests the Bund’s limitations, highlighting its failed women’s movement. Jacobs provides a fascinating account of Bundist movements and a thoughtful revision to the accepted view.

Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland

Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland PDF Author: Jack Jacobs
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815651430
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
In the years between the two world wars, the Jewish community of Poland—the largest in Europe—was the cultural heart of the Jewish diaspora. The Jewish Workers’ Bund, which had a socialist, secularist, Yiddishist, and anti-Zionist orientation, won a series of important electoral battles in Poland on the eve of the Second World War and became a major political party. Many earlier works on the politics of Polish Jewry have suggested that Bundist victories were ephemeral or attributable to outside forces. Jack Jacobs, however, argues convincingly that the electoral success of the Bund was linked to the long-term efforts of the constellation of cultural, educational, and other movements revolving around the party. The Bundist movements for children, youth, and women, and for physical education offered highly innovative programs and promoted countercultural values. Drawing on meticulously researched archival materials, Jacobs shows how the development of these programs—such as a program to provide sex education to working-class Jewish youth—translated into a stronger, more robust party. At the same time, he suggests the Bund’s limitations, highlighting its failed women’s movement. Jacobs provides a fascinating account of Bundist movements and a thoughtful revision to the accepted view.

Intimate Violence

Intimate Violence PDF Author: Jeffrey S. Kopstein
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501715275
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
"This book employs archival research and statistical analysis on an original dataset of a summer 1941 wave of anti-Jewish pogroms to show that pogroms occurred not where antisemitism was strongest, but where local Jews challenged local non-Jews' dreams of national dominance"--

The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism

The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism PDF Author: Jack Jacobs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521513758
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
This book explores the ways in which the Jewish backgrounds of leading Frankfurt School Critical Theorists shaped their lives, work, and ideas.

Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920

Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920 PDF Author: William W. Hagen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108695388
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 572

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Book Description
Widespread anti-Jewish pogroms accompanied the rebirth of Polish statehood out of World War I and Polish–Soviet War. William W. Hagen offers the pogroms' first scholarly account, revealing how they served as brutal stagings by ordinary people of scenarios dramatizing popular anti-Jewish fears and resentments. While scholarship on modern anti-Semitism has stressed its ideological inspiration ('print anti-Semitism'), this study shows that anti-Jewish violence by perpetrators among civilians and soldiers expressed magic-infused anxieties and longings for redemption from present threats and suffering ('folk anti-Semitism'). Illustrated with contemporary photographs and constructed from extensive, newly discovered archival sources from three continents, this is an innovative work in east European history. Using extensive first-person testimonies, it reveals gaps - but also correspondences - between popular attitudes and those of the political elite. The pogroms raged against the conscious will of new Poland's governors whilst Christians high and low sometimes sought, even successfully, to block them.

From Europe's East to the Middle East

From Europe's East to the Middle East PDF Author: Kenneth Moss
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812299574
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
The overwhelming majority of Jews who laid the foundations of the Israeli state during the first half of the twentieth century came from the Polish lands and the Russian Empire. This is a fact widely known, yet its implications for the history of Israel and the Middle East and, reciprocally, for the history of what was once the demographic heartland of the Jewish diaspora remain surprisingly ill-understood. Through fine-grained analyses of people, texts, movements, and worldviews in motion, the scholars assembled in From Europe's East to the Middle East—hailing from Europe, Israel, Japan, and the United States—rediscover a single transnational Jewish history of surprising connections, ideological cacophony, and entangled fates. Against the view of Israel as an outpost of the West, whether as a beacon of democracy or a creation of colonialism, this volume reveals how profoundly Zionism and Israel were shaped by the assumptions of Polish nationalism, Russian radicalism, and Soviet Communism; the unique ethos of the East European intelligentsia; and the political legacies of civil and national strife in the East European "shatter-zone." Against the view that Zionism effected a complete break from the diaspora that had birthed it, the book sheds new light on the East European sources of phenomena as diverse as Zionist military culture, kibbutz socialism, and ultra-Orthodox education for girls. Finally, it reshapes our understanding of East European Jewish life, from the Tsarist Empire, to independent Poland, to the late Soviet Union. Looking past siloed histories of both Zionism and its opponents in Eastern Europe, the authors reconstruct Zionism's transnational character, charting unexpected continuities across East European and Israeli Jewish life, and revealing how Jews in Eastern Europe grew ever more entangled with the changing realities of Jewish society in Palestine.

European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917-1957

European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917-1957 PDF Author: Dina Gusejnova
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107120624
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Explores European civilisation as a concept of twentieth-century political practice and the project of a transnational network of European elites. This title is available as Open Access.

Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism

Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism PDF Author: Max Kaiser
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031101235
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
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.

A Jew in the Street

A Jew in the Street PDF Author: Nancy Sinkoff
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814349692
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
These investigations illuminate the entangled experiences of Jews who sought to balance the pull of communal, religious, and linguistic traditions with the demands and allure of full participation in European life.

The Tragedy of a Generation

The Tragedy of a Generation PDF Author: Joshua M. Karlip
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674074963
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
The Tragedy of a Generation is the story of the rise and fall of an ideal: an autonomous Jewish nation in Europe. It traces the origins of two influential but overlooked strains of Jewish thought—Yiddishism and Diaspora Nationalism—and documents the waning hopes and painful reassessments of their leading representatives against the rising tide of Nazism and, later, the Holocaust. Joshua M. Karlip presents three figures—Elias Tcherikower, Yisroel Efroikin, and Zelig Kalmanovitch—seen through the lens of Imperial Russia on the brink of revolution. Leaders in the struggle for recognition of the Jewish people as a national entity, these men would prove instrumental in formulating the politics of Diaspora Nationalism, a middle path that rejected both the Zionist emphasis on Palestine and the Marxist faith in class struggle. Closely allied with this ideology was Yiddishism, a movement whose adherents envisioned the Yiddish language and culture, not religious tradition, as the unifying force of Jewish identity. We follow Tcherikower, Efroikin, and Kalmanovitch as they navigate the tumultuous early decades of the twentieth century in pursuit of a Jewish national renaissance in Eastern Europe. Correcting the misconception of Yiddishism as a radically secular movement, Karlip uncovers surprising confluences between Judaism and the avowedly nonreligious forms of Jewish nationalism. An essential contribution to Jewish historiography, The Tragedy of a Generation is a probing and poignant chronicle of lives shaped by ideological conviction and tested to the limits by historical crisis.