Radical Jewish Politics: A Global Perspective asks an intriguing question: what do we notice when we look at cases of Jewish radicalism from across the globe, across history? It helpfully de-centers the over-emphasized, and often romanticized, European Jewish experiences of radicalism. In focusing on radical histories, it demystifies the (also often romanticized) experience of Jews outside Europe. Those stories are usually either narratives of long-term dislocation or absolute integration: Jews are either eternal foreigners or members of the royal court.
Still, I take issue with the term “global” in the subtitle. While the book does expand beyond the usual scope of research, the editors’ implicit understanding of the term “global” involves little more than collecting different narratives from around the globe. The book does this, even though it could have had an even wider scope to include other regions (had space not been a constraint).
Unfortunately, the tone of the volume is essentially encyclopedic. Rather that provide an account of a global Jewish network and its potentialities, the chapters enumerate case after case without fully drawing a connection between the cases or speculating about possible links that could be derived from the cases at hand. It is a diverse set of accounts, both geographically and in variations of the term radical, but it does not deliver an account of the global element of Jewish politics.
A global perspective would demonstrate how Jewish radical politics is not a phenomenon that can be limited to specific times and places. Instead, approaching Jewish radicalism globally teaches us something about radical politics in general. For example, it offers lessons concerning the traps of integration. It teaches us something about colonial divide-and-conquer policies, efforts to resist them, and their seduction. It alerts us to conservative appropriations of transformative ideas. But in merely recounting tightly framed stories, there are no lessons to be learned or action to be taken: Jewish radical politics is reduced to museum exhibits.
Put another way, the book lacks a global account of mechanisms of oppression and a global account of resistance and liberation. Each case represents a specific constellation of oppression and radical response to it, but precisely because each constellation is so unique and specific, their value (beyond curiosity) emerges from the lessons one extracts once the cases are read as speaking beyond their context, i.e., globally.
Can the comparison between Jewish radicalism in the Middle East, the Russian autonomous zone, and Latin American Jewish experiences teach us something about counter-hegemonic postures? About the value of nationalism? The meaning of international solidarity or collectivity?
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Radical Jewish Politics is divided into four sections: (1) The Middle East and North Africa; (2) Americas, South Africa, and Asia; (3) East Europe and the Balkans; (4) Unorthodox Radicalisms. The first part is by far the most extensive. It covers experiences from Morocco to Iran and everything in between, including Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, and Iraq. As the editors and some of the chapter authors emphasize, most scholarship is dedicated to European and North American experience and to movements shaped by Ashkenazi Jews; the book offers a corrective.
It also offers an unconventional approach to a region that is usually narrated with Zionism as its frame, where the animating question is whether Jews were Zionists waiting for the opportunity to leave their homes or were well-integrated into their society and pushed or pulled to abandon their established status. The lens of radicalism offers a new perspective: Jews were neither Zionist nor well-integrated. They were uncomfortable with the socio-political conditions they lived under and were engaged in changing them. In some cases, they employed more nationalist approaches, in other cases, more internationalist approaches; in some cases, Jewish commitments motivated them, in other cases, they acted as citizens of the world.
The book’s second section covers what are the most diverse and under-studied regions: South America, South Africa, and the Russian autonomous experiment. These areas are often exoticized or treated only anecdotally in Jewish studies. Given the limited existing scholarship, the chapters are broader in scope, offering helpful context. The chapter on the Soviet’s Birobidzhan experiment at creating an autonomous Jewish region in the Far East describes the unfolding of the project from its original conception to tension with Stalinist antisemitism and the project’s stagnation. Chapters on Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa explore the radical elements that permeate their history over waves of immigration. Each focuses on how the Jewish community related to the oppressive regimes that marked the recent history of those countries: apartheid in South Africa and military dictatorship in Argentina and Brazil.
The third section covers Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the regions traditionally associated with Jewish radicalism. Lithuania and Hungary, the focus of two of the three chapters of this part, offer refreshing approaches to familiar topics, for example, by examining the Jewish socialist formula of “herenesss” [Doykait] in a folklorist frame rather than a labor one. The most interesting and innovative chapter in this part focuses on Thessaloniki, tracing the life of Abraham Benaroya as the embodiment of the region and tracking how Jews negotiated the region’s transition from Ottoman to Greek. Benaroya formed worker federations that tied together socialism, internationalism, and multiculturalism. Jewish radicalism in Thessoloniki involved a significant portion of the Jewish community and had perhaps the biggest impact of the radicalisms surveyed, laying the foundations for contemporary radical movements in Greece.
The last section of Radical Jewish Politics, Unorthodox Radicalisms, breaks with the case study approach. Its first chapter focuses on Jewish anarchism in all its variations, with an emphasis on Yiddish poetry and press. It also highlights Jewish elements of classic anarchist thinkers such as Emma Goldman’s reference to Jewish messianism and her appreciation Jewish songs. Still, the most striking element of the chapter is that, unlike the others in the book, it ends with present cases of Jewish radicalism. The chapter concludes with a reference to the Pink Peacock, a Jewish pay-what-you-can café in Glasgow (since closed), and a zine surveying ways to resist far-right developments via mutual aid and solidarity. This reference to living embodiments of Jewish radicalism is one of the few places where the book shifts from a mere historical account of past events to a lesson for the present – cultivating hope for the future.
The two remaining chapters of Unorthodox Radicalisms were for me the most complicated to digest and the most problematic. They focus on the ways rhetorical devices and marginalized populations, respectively, were part of right-wing Zionist movements. The chapters start from the basic claim that radicalism should be understood in a broad sense to also include conservative radicalism – the term “radicalism” does not lose its meaning when it shifts from right to left. Then they show how elements of conservative radicalism and progressive radicalism mix, such as in popular resistance to authoritarianism and to colonialism.
These chapters make clear the central limitation of the historicist approach to radicalism. It might be historically accurate that the right-wing movements saw themselves as anti-authoritarian. But we must evaluate that claim – particularly in an age when such claims are echoing loudly. Historical precision is necessary but insufficient.
Radical Jewish Politics is an interesting collection of stories, but it is nothing more than that. It collects stories of the Jewish past like one collects antiquities – it is what Nietzsche calls history as antiquarianism. Jewish radicalism becomes exotic and even more distant from our current situation precisely when we need it the most. We don’t need scholars to tell us that Jewish radicalism is something of the past, dead, buried, and long forgotten. The world already tells us that every day. We need articulations of Jewish radicalism for today that activate its legacy. Radical Jewish Politics does not fill that need.
