For the first time, this volume centers the rich but little known history of radical Jewish politics in the Middle East and North Africa and puts it into conversation with developments in the Americas, South Africa, Soviet Asia, and Europe. Jews were attracted to radical politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to transform the societies they lived in but also out of a deep desire to belong. Somewhat paradoxically, then, radical politics held out the enticing possibility of normalization for Jews, even as it frequently resulted in their further alienation or persecution. In some cases, Jewish radicals sought recognition and autonomy as Jews; in others, Jews labored to be accepted as full-fledged citizens of their home countries; in still others, they tried to escape Jewishness altogether. Jewish experiences of modernity, colonialism, race, nationalism, emancipation, war, and migration, serve as the connective tissue that binds together radical Jewish politics from Baghdad to Buenos Aires.
"By foregrounding the experience of Jews in the modern Middle East and North Africa, this exciting volume recharts the historiography of radical Jewish politics on a global scale, presented in all of its drama, depth, and diversity."
"Placing the Middle East and North Africa at its center, this important volume challenges conventional geographies and the conception of Jewish radicalism itself. It shows how colonialism, and in turn anticolonial movements, drove Jews to embrace radical politics as they navigated the rise of the nation state and their future in it."
Introduction: Global Radical Jewish Politics 1 Nathaniel Deutsch, Alma Rachel Heckman, and Tony Michels PA R T I The Middle East and North Africa 1 Radicalism, Emancipation, and Nationalism: The Story of Moroccan Jewish Communists 31 Alma Rachel Heckman 2 “Yes, We Are Native Algerian Jews . . .”: The Anti-Colonialist Jews of Algeria, ca. 1920–1970 49 Pierre-Jean Le Foll-Luciani (translated from the French by Jane Teresa Kuntz) 3 Between Gallicism and Communism: Jews and Politics in Tunisia, 1881–1945 61 Kamilia Rahmouni 4 Communist Jews and Egypt’s Struggle for National Liberation 78 Rami Ginat 5 Subjugated Homeland, Unhappy People: Iraqi Jewish Communist Women, 1941–1966 97 Orit Bashkin 6 The Roots of Jewish Radicalism in Iran 114 Lior B. Sternfeld 7 Panthers and Leashes: A History of Mizrahi Radicalism 135 Dario Miccoli
PA R T I I The Americas, South Africa, and Asia 8 A Century of Radical Jewish Politics in Argentina 151 Nathaniel Deutsch 9 Jewish Radicals in Twentieth-Century Brazil 168 Michael Rom 10 Jewish Radicals: The South African Experience 181 Milton Shain and Richard Mendelsohn 11 Radical Jewish Politics in the Key of Land, Language, and Labor: The Birobidzhan Project 189 Robert Weinberg PA RT I I I Eastern Europe and the Balkans 12 Lithuania and the Making of the Jewish Working Class 211 Michael Casper 13 Communists and Zionists in Hungary, 1945–1953 221 Peter Kenez 14 Jewish Radicalism Between Ottoman Socialism and Greek Communism, 1908–1936 234 Kostis Karpozilos and Paris Papamichos Chronakis PA R T I V Unorthodox Radicalisms 15 Jewish Anarchism 265 Anna Elena Torres 16 Politics of the Comparative Gaze: The Three Languages of Right-Wing Zionist Radicalism 280 Arie M. Dubnov 17 Middle Eastern and North African Jews in the Irgun and Lehi in British Mandatory Palestine 307 Avery Weinman Acknowledgments 331 Notes on Contributors 333 Index 000
NATHANIEL DEUTSCH is Distinguished Professor of History and Baumgarten Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of a number of award winning books, including The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement, for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
ALMA RACHEL HECKMAN is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging.
TONY MICHELS is the George L. Mosse Professor of American Jewish History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York, which won the Salo Baron Prize for Best First Book in Jewish Studies.
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