“A new and modern golden age of Jewish culture”: shaping the cultural politics of transnational Jewish antifascism

ABSTRACT

The Holocaust and a worldwide Jewish enthusiasm and support for the Red Army’s defeat of the German Army on the Eastern Front led to a greater sense of international Jewish consciousness and solidarity often tied to an antifascist politics. Utilizing a transnational lens, I explore how Jewish antifascists of the immediate post-war period proffered a novel cultural politics as a means of addressing ongoing international issues of post-Holocaust Jewish survival in a dangerous and politically uncertain modernity. I examine three Jewish left magazines of the late 1940s that were involved in a loose international antifascist progressive Jewish network and ideological framework. These magazines Jewish Life (USA), New Life (UK) and Unity (Australia) represented similar antifascist politics and cultural outlooks in the USA, Britain and Australia, respectively. They have received little sustained scholarly attention previously. I analyse their vision of diverse multilingual Jewish cultures which were to be promoted and developed in any country where Jews lived and in whatever language they spoke. Their cultural vision represented antifascist values against bourgeois or nationalist Jewish culture and broadly reflected a pro-Soviet, progressive and Jewish internationalist, Popular Front politics and worldview.

KEYWORDS:

• Jewish antifascism
• Jewish communism
• Yiddishism
• nationalism
• cultural politics

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Sara Wills, Jordana Silverstein, Andrew Sloin and Jehonathan Ben for their helpful feedback on this article in its earlier stages.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Max Kaiser is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Melbourne. He is currently researching a history of post-war Australian Jewish antifascism.

ORCID

Max Kaiser http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1853-1347

Notes

1 The broad consensus on Goldmann’s antifascist analysis and principles are reflected in the resolutions of the second assembly (see World Jewish Congress 1948). Goldmann of course, in the years following this meeting of the Congress, led the WJC to embrace Israel and the Zionist movement as its primary political purpose.

2 The cultural politics of Jewish Life (USA) have been examined by Alan M. Wald as discussed below (see also Staub 2002, 29–44).

3 For an example of this approach in the Canadian context, see Reiter (2016a, 136–137). Although not mentioned by Reiter, an English-language magazine offshoot of the Communist Yiddish weekly Vochenblatt of a similar outlook to Unity, New Life and Jewish Life was published in Toronto called New Voice (1946–1948). For an overview of the current historiography on “antifascism,” see García (2016).

4 See also Mullen (1999) cited in Balthaser (2016).

5 For an overview of the geo-political positioning of the Soviet Union, in particular the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and its effect on the international left during this period, see Pons (2015). Jewish Communism was to an extent, always a transnational phenomenon, and there are clear continuities here with the Jewish Popular Front politics of the late 1930s, a politics encouraged by the Comintern after 1937 (see Hoffman 2010; Underwood 2016; Zaagsma 2017, 34–36, 61–105). However, in the UK, Australia and the USA, both a wider enthusiasm for a Popular Front politics in Jewish communities and a transcendence of Yiddishism on the antifascist (non-Zionist) left were post-1942 phenomena.

6 It is likely that there was a corresponding movement in non-English-speaking countries with substantial Jewish populations but this is beyond the scope of the present study.

7 Though it is notable that this was not a monolithic vision or policy (see Pinkus 1988, 52). In actuality this project was more complex and contradictory, producing new forms of Jewish cultural practice (see Shneer 2004; Shternshis 2006).

8 Hoffman suggests that after the Popular Front period began “the communists’ form of Jewishness becomes much less distinctive and more similar to other forms of left-wing Jewish identity and culture” (see Zucker 1994; Hoffman 2016, 21).

9 In some respects this was an echo of earlier conflicts between the Bund and the Bolsheviks over the supposed “nationalism” of limited claims for Jewish autonomy (see Gechtman 2008).

10 See also Rubenstein and Naumov (2005).

11 For a biographical sketch of Schappes, see Wald (2007, 174–180).

12 See New Life (1948, 2 (5)).

13 For a brief discussion of Unity as it related to a later successor magazine The Bridge (Sydney, 1964–1973) see Rutland (2005).

14 See Unity (1949, 2 (3)).

15 While still, at least theoretically, dedicated to a politics of Jewish Popular Front unity, the previous Jewish Communist publication in Australia had a much more dogmatic line featuring, for the most part, only Communist writers. See The Voice: A Jewish Monthly (Melbourne, 1944–1947).

16 There are continuities here with earlier generations of Jewish “culturists” who saw culture as a means of psychic and collective reformation (see Moss 2009, 10–22).

17 While I am inspired here by José Esteban Muñoz’s (2009) conceptualisation of “queer futurity”, the concept of “dynamic futurity” here is my own formulation. Both are necessarily critical of and “profoundly resistant” to the status quo of existing society, figured as inimical to their respective projected futures. However, Muñoz’s utopian futurity is explicitly positioned as a Kantian regulative ideal, to be strived for continually but never actually achieved, as forever anticipatory. In this reading, futurity is a potentiality within the quotidian (see Muñoz 2009, 1–22). An antifascist Jewish dynamic futurity, on the other hand, was both an explicit, though at times contradictory, political and cultural vision or programme and an actually existing continual political, cultural and geographic praxis, encompassing both a rejection of assimilationism and of an ideal of Jewish exodus from Europe or elsewhere, and concentration in Palestine.

18 On Ausubel see Friedmann (2016).

19 In the progressive language of the time “cultural worker” referred to artists, writers and performers. It was a means of emphasising their membership in the working class as against romantic notions of the artistic genius.

20 Zhdanovism was the strict Soviet political and cultural doctrine developed by Central Committee secretary Andrei Zhdanov in 1946.

21 For a history of Yiddishism as a cultural–political movement, see Trachtenberg (2008) and Katz (2004, 264–278).

22 See also “Not ‘Back to Yiddish’ but let’s not turn our back to Yiddish, where it still lives!” (Jackson 1947b).

23 See Carter (1997) for a thorough account of Waten’s life, writings and politics.