"Jews and Revolution: From the United States to Russia and Back"

During the first half of the 20th century, Jews in the United States played an active role in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, as well as subsequent developments in the Soviet Union. Their activities ranged from shipping illegal reading materials to providing humanitarian aid to Soviet political dissidents to raising money for the Red Army during World War II. Russia often served as the focal point of American Jewish communal politics, orienting and reorienting political alliances and priorities. With varying levels of success, Jews worked for political democracy, workers’ emancipation, and Jewish national liberation through their engagements with Russia.

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 (Harvard), which won the Salo Baron Prize for the best first book in Jewish studies, the editor of Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History (NYU), and co-editor (with Mitchell Hart) of The Cambridge History of Judaism. Volume Eight: The Modern World, 1815-2000. He is also the former co-editor of the scholarly journal Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society.

This talk is a part of the Gale Collaborative on Jewish Life in the Americas Lecture Series.

Host or Publisher Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies