About the Book
The American Jewish Communist movement played a major role in the politics of Jewish communities in cities such as Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia, as well as in many other centers, between the 1920s and the 1950s. Making extensive use of Yiddish-language books, newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, and other materials, Dreams of Nationhood traces the ideological and material support provided to the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan, located in the far east of the Soviet Union, by two American Jewish Communist-led organizations, the ICOR and the American Birobidzhan Committee. By providing a detailed historical examination of the political work of these two groups, the book makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century Jewish life in the United States.
About the Author :
Henry Srebrnik (PhD, University of Birmingham, England) is a Professor in the Department of Political Studies, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. His most recent books include Jerusalem on the Amur: Birobidzhan and the Canadian Jewish Communist Movement, 1924-1951 (McGill-Queen s University Press, 2008) and London Jews and British Communism, 1935-1945 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1995) He also served on the editorial team for De Facto States: The Quest For Sovereignty (London: Routledge, 2004) with Tozun Bahcheli and Barry Bartmann.
Review :
Henry Srebrnik began his research of the place of Birobidzhan in the ideological space of American Jews over a decade ago. I believe I have read the majority of his publications on this fascinating and little-known topic, and this new book, Dreams of Nationhood, is the best among them. Gennady Estraikh, New York University, author of In Harness: Yiddish Writers' Romance with Communism
This work by Srebrnik (political studies, U. of Prince Edward Island, Canada) is a reconstruction of the engagement of two American Jewish Communist groups with the Soviet project of establishing a Jewish "autonomous" oblast in the Soviet Far-East over the years 1924-1951. The author offers a narrative reconstruction of how the Association for Jewish Colonization in Soviet Russia (ICOR), founded in 1924 and composed primarily of first and second generation Yiddish-speaking Jews of East European origin, and the American Committee for the Settlement of Jews in Birobidjan (Ambijan), "founded in 1934 as a popular front group catering to native-born, English-speaking, middle-class Jews," described and understood their own activities, as seen through their own written accounts and perspectives found in their newspapers' news stories, editorials, belles lettres, poems, organizational notices, advertisements, brief notices, and other materials. The focus is self-consciously narrow in that readers interested in, just for the sake of example, the histories of Birobidjan itself or communism among American Jews are referred to the already well-established literature elsewhere. (Annotation 2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Dreaming of a better world during the Depression and World War II, American Jews and some non-Jewish activists supported the building of a Jewish refuge in the Soviet Union called Birobidzhan. Henry Srebrnik s well-researched book, Dreams of Nationhood, shows readers that although short-lived, the American campaign for Birobidzhan was more widespread and important than anyone today might believe. Its most important supporters were leftist, Communist activists in such groups as ICOR and Ambidjan. However, Srebrnik painstakingly shows that in the 1930s and 1940s, Birobidzhan was discussed in polite company as a real alternative to Palestine. The book features Communist activists like Moishe Olgin and B.Z. Goldberg, as well as some unusual suspects including senators, pastors, well-known rabbis, and Albert Einstein. Srebrnik forces the reader to ask whether this is a story of willful ignorance on the part of the Americans, who did not understand the violence of Stalin s Soviet Union, or whether the idea of utopia simply captivated a group of people far away from the turmoil of 1930s and 1940s Europe? David Shneer, University of Colorado at Boulder, author of Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture
Henry Srebrnik s book, Dreams of Nationhood: American Jewish Communists and the Soviet Birobidzhan Project, 1924-1951, is a richly detailed study of a fascinating, often neglected chapter in the history of the Jewish communist movement in the United States. In this meticulously researched book, Srebrnik thoroughly chronicles the world of the Jewish communist and pro-Soviet subculture that was established in the United States in 1920s until its demise in the early 1950s, drawing from an array of primary and archival sources in order to provide the reader with a sense of the lived experience of the adherents and participants of the Jewish communist movement. Srebrnik s in-depth account conveys a sense of the utopian ideals that drove many Jews, communist and non-communist, as well as many non-Jewish supporters, to look to the Siberian province of Birobidzhan as a territorial solution to the Jewish national problem. His main accomplishment, perhaps, is the extent to which he shows just how active and persistent this movement was in its support for the creation of a Jewish national home in Birobidzhan. Srebrnik s scholarship sheds new light on our understanding of the Jewish communist movement in North America and the larger network of supporters of the Soviet Union in the years before the Cold War. Matthew Hoffman, Associate Professor, Judaic Studies & History, Franklin & Marshall College
