This symposium on “Dissent on the Jewish Left” has its roots in a panel at the meeting of the Organization of American Historians, co-sponsored by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and the American Jewish Historical Society, in April 2014. It takes as a starting point the straightforward historical observation that the “Left and the Jews were so thoroughly enmeshed that one could not necessarily discern where one ended and the other began,” as Tony Michaels, one of the contributors to this symposium, has written elsewhere. “Jews populated the breadth of the American left, from moderate social democrats to self-proclaimed revolutionaries.”Footnote1 Not surprisingly, those groups came into conflict on numerous occasions. The OAH session explored several such moments in Jewish and Communist history that exposed pronounced fissures among immigrant radicals. Leftist Jews “contended with … issues that pitted their loyalty to an internationalist movement against their sense of Jewish unity,” as the conference proposal put it. “The resultant infighting on the Jewish Left cut to the heart of the tension between universalism and Jewish identity.”
The articles that follow not only explore conflicts among different groups of Jewish radicals; they also examine the contours of a heterogeneous left-wing critique of the Soviet Union and the American Communist Party that emerged out of socialist and anarchist currents in the 1920s, a critique that was rooted in communities of immigrant and second generation Jews who shared aspects of the vision of radical transformation advanced by the Communist Party but who also recoiled from the Party's doctrines, ideology, and practices. In inviting readers to take progressive anticommunism seriously, these articles challenge a still prevalent framework that reduces anticommunism to its lowest common denominator or dismisses left-wing anticommunism as complicit in the project of its cruder counterparts.
Notes
1 Tony Michels, ed., Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 14, 15.