Abstract
In an April 1950 article for The Zionist, prominent Zionist leader, Aaron Patkin laid out a critique of the Jewish antifascist left. In his rendering, the ‘policy and the tactics’ of the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism (Jewish Council) ‘[do] not “combat” but “spread” Antisemitism’ in an effort he considered ‘both futile and undignified’. For Patkin, the Jewish Council was a ‘useless’ organisation because he believed that a Jewish politics that tried to intervene against antisemitism in Australia was doomed to failure. This prevalent Zionist analysis, which saw antisemitism as an unavoidable and omnipresent product of Jews living as minorities in ‘diaspora’ communities, contended that the only realistic means of dealing with antisemitism was to create a radically new international political situation for the Jewish people through the Jewish nation-state.
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Notes
- 1.
Rabbi James Kennard, Public Facebook comment, 2 January 2017, Galus Australis Facebook group, http://bit.ly/2llQMN7, Accessed 06/02/2017.
- 2.
David Martin, The Shepherd and the Hunter (London: Allan Wingate, 1946), 20.
- 3.
A. L. Patkin, “Press Review: The ‘Unity’,” The Zionist, April 1950. On The Zionist see Max Kaiser, “Zionism, Assimilationism and Antifascism: Divergent International Jewish Pathways in Three Post-War Australian Jewish Magazines,” in The Transnational Voices of Australia’s Migrant and Minority Press in a Global Context, edited by Catherine Dewhirst and Richard Scully (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
Dr. Nahum Goldmann, “Opening Address,” in Papers from the World Jewish Congress Second Plenary Assembly (Montreux, Switzerland: World Jewish Congress (WJC). Available at http://www.bjpa.org/Publications/details.cfm?PublicationID=22287, 1948).
- 6.
In Australia the Jewish antifascist left’s embrace of an alliance with Zionists dates to the inception of the new Popular Front unity politics circa 1943, see NAA: A6122, 444, “Proposals for Unity by Jewish Communists.”
- 7.
Suzanne Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia (Sydney, NSW: Collins Australia, 1988), 295–310.
- 8.
This began with the 1939 MacDonald White Paper, restricting Jewish immigration. However, the Yishuv’s fortunes were inextricably tied to the fortunes of the British empire in World War Two, dampening protests until after the war. Ibid., 307–310. For the role of the British in facilitating Zionist colonisation, see Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 31–64.
- 9.
The Australian intelligence services were thus concerned not only with communist activism within the Jewish community but also with Zionism, see NAA: A6122, 155 REFERENCE COPY, “Jewish Unity Association” (1941–1949).
- 10.
For a discussion of the intersection between Popular Front politics, a changing communist position on Palestine and the shift in Soviet foreign policy, see Paul Kelemen, The British Left and Zionism: History of a Divorce (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2012), 86–106. For an examination of the change in Soviet policy, see Laurent Rucker, Moscow’s Surprise: The Soviet-Israeli Alliance of 1947–1949 (Cold War International History project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2005). For Gromyko’s speech, see Andrei Gromyko, “Palestine at UNO: Extracts from the Speech Made by Mr. Andrei Gromyko at the General Assembly of UNO on May 14th,” New Life 1, no. 5 (1947).
- 11.
For an account of how the Soviet Union’s support for Israel allowed the communist David Martin to briefly edit the Sydney Jewish News, see David Martin, My Strange Friend: An Autobiography (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1991), 213–214.
- 12.
For example, “Safeguard the Jewish State!,” Jewish Life 2, no. 3 (1948); Ber Mark, “Voice of the Oppressed: World Congress of Intellectuals in Wroclaw, Poland, August, 1948,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 1, no. 6 (1949).
- 13.
See Burgoyne Chapman, “The Vindication of [],” Australian Jewish News, 21 July 1950. Philip Mendes, “The Australian Left’s Support for the Creation of the State of Israel, 1947–48,” Labour History (2009): 137–148. It is understandable why the Jewish Council drew these two issues together. While there were no antisemitic riots around the issue as there were in Britain, the period saw an upshot in antisemitism in the Australian press, and as Norman Rothfield then put it ‘there was undoubtedly an attempt by anti-Semitic groups in this country to utilise the situation in Israel for the purpose of creating ill-feeling towards the Jews in Australia’. Quoted in Norman Rothfield, Many Paths to Peace (Fairfield: Yarraford Publications, 1997), 23.
- 14.
“Jewish Unity Association;” Dr. Joachim Schneeweiss, interview by Suzanne Rutland, 19 April & 22 June 1987, State Library of New South Wales, Suzanne Rutland collection, CY MLOH 437/168–169. Although this did not mean that Unity was a socialist Zionist magazine.
- 15.
The Jewish left in Australia certainly had a closer affinity with the Zionist movement than the Jewish left elsewhere. In Sydney there were a number of prominent Zionists involved in Unity/SCCFAS. This was the case in Melbourne too, although by the late 1940s these figures were not in leading positions in the Jewish Council. “Jewish Unity Association”; Rothfield, Many Paths to Peace, 22. There seems to have been little engagement by Unity with the non-Zionist Israeli Communist Party/Palestine Communist Party despite David Martin’s involvement in the party, see Martin, My Strange Friend, 96.
- 16.
Evelyn Rothfield, Whither Palestine (Melbourne: Dolphin Publications, 1947). I discuss Rothfield’s pamphlet further below. Binationalist and Yishuvist views were expressed throughout the run of The Voice, the Melbourne Jewish communist magazine. For an example of this position on the international Jewish left, see R.S. Gordon, “The Jewish Dilemma in Palestine,” New Life 1, no. 1 (1947). David Martin’s play ‘The Shepherd and the Hunter’ produced by the Unity theatre in London in 1946 and by the New Theatre in Sydney in 1947 is an example of a broadly Yishuvist politics in the Australian Jewish and non-Jewish left during this period. Martin, The Shepherd and the Hunter. See Max Kaiser and Lisa Milner. “‘Part of What We Thought and Felt’: Antifascism, Antisemitism and Jewish Connections with the New Theatre,” Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History 120, no. 1 (2021): 106–111.
- 17.
Musa Budeiri, The Palestine Communist Party, 1919–1948 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 1979; repr., 2010), 9.
- 18.
Kelemen, British Left and Zionism, 96–103. As suggested by Evan Smith, after the dissolving of the Comintern in 1943 the CPGB ‘became an influential leader’ in analysing and providing political direction for anti-colonial movements in the British Empire, see Evan Smith, British Communism and the Politics of Race (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018), 33–34.
- 19.
Budeiri, Palestine Communist Party, 9.
- 20.
Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 54–56.
- 21.
For example, see “Palestine – a World Issue: World Jewry’s Responsibility,” New Life 1, no. 9 (1947).
- 22.
Australian Communist Party Jewish Sub-Committee, “We Support the Yishuv in Palestine,” The Voice, November 1945; S. Mikunis, “Set Palestine Free,” The Voice, March 1947. Mikunis was a key figure in the Palestine Communist Party.
- 23.
Kelemen, British Left and Zionism, 100.
- 24.
Ran Greenstein, Zionism and Its Discontents: A Century of Radical Dissent in Israel/Palestine (London: Pluto Press, 2014), 50–103.
- 25.
See Patrick Wolfe, “Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics,” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012): 133–171; Nur Masalha, The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory (London & New York: Zed Books, 2012), 19–87.
- 26.
Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London and New York: Verso, 2016), 223.
- 27.
Ibid., 223–235; Steven A. Glazer, “Language of Propaganda: The Histadrut, Hebrew Labor, and the Palestinian Worker,” Journal of Palestine Studies XXXVI, no. 2 (2007): 25–38. David Martin’s short story ‘Kibush Avodah’ is a searing indictment of this doctrine. Martin was briefly a member of the Palestine Communist Party and this story is evidence of objections to ‘Avoda Ivrit’ amongst sections of the international Jewish antifascist left. David Martin, “Kibush Avodah,” in The Shoes Men Walk In (London: The Pilot Press Ltd, 1946). In a similar vein, see Walter Kaufmann, “Dawn,” in The Curse of Maralinga, and Other Stories (Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1959).
- 28.
Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 45–90; Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, 50–57.
- 29.
While Johan Franzen attributes a somewhat overblown role to the Yishuvist ideological campaign in influencing Soviet policy, the majority of scholars emphasise a more realist strategic calculus behind this change. The Soviet change of policy had multiple causal factors including that of supporting worldwide decolonisation efforts and the dismantling of the British empire. Johan Franzen, “Communism Versus Zionism: The Comintern, Yishuvism, and the Palestine Communist Party,” Journal of Palestine Studies 36, no. 2 (2007): 6–24; Rucker, Moscow’s Surprise; Yaacov Ro’i, Soviet Decision Making in Practice: The USSR and Israel, 1947–1954 (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Books, 1980), 15–293.
- 30.
Rothfield was a founding member of (the socialist Zionist group) Habonim in the United Kingdom in the 1930s and had strong links with the Yishuv/Israel. She visited family and stayed on a Kibbutz in 1947. However, she was not active in Zionist organisations after she migrated to Australia in 1939. Evelyn Rothfield, The Future Is Past (Fairfield, Victoria: E. Rothfield, 1992); Evelyn Rothfield, Whither Palestine (Melbourne: Dolphin Publications, 1947); Evelyn Rothfield, Israel Reborn (Melbourne: Dolphin Publications, 1948).
- 31.
Both pamphlets were published by Dolphin Publications which I discuss further in Chap. 6.
- 32.
For an account of Palestinian Arab opposition to Jewish settlement during this period, see Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 65–139. The idea that there were no Palestinian people with a national claim and that Arab opposition to Zionism was fomented by a reactionary elite minority was a mainstay of left Zionist ideology in this period. See Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, 45, 63–65.
- 33.
See Masalha, The Palestine Nakba, 33–43. Rothfield’s politics and international Yishuvism more generally could also be compared with the British Labour Party’s support for the ‘elevated colonialism’ of Zionism. David Feldman, “Zionism and the British Labour Party,” in Colonialism and the Jews, eds., Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2017), 197–206.
- 34.
Rothfield, Whither Palestine. On the shifting politics of Hashomer Hatzair in this period see Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, 348–351.
- 35.
Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis of Zionism,” in The Jewish Writings, eds. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007).
- 36.
For a discussion of the post-war politics of federalism and how Arendt’s vision of Palestine fitted within these ideological currents, see Gil Rubin, “From Federalism to Binationalism: Hannah Arendt’s Shifting Zionism,” Contemporary European History 24, no. 3 (2015): 393–414.
- 37.
Rothfield, Whither Palestine.
- 38.
See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harcourt Books, 1951; repr., 1976), 267–290. Roni Gechtman notes that there was an alignment between Wilsonian self-determination and the Soviet Union’s communist ideal of national self-determination. Roni Gechtman, “A ‘Museum of Bad Taste’? The Jewish Labour Bund and the Bolshevik Position Regarding the National Question, 1903–1914,” Canadian Journal of History 43, no. 1 (2008): 65. Adom Getachew, by contrast, emphasises the counterposed character of Wilsonian counter-revolutionary self-determination and communist self-determination, at least in its 1917 iteration. Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019), 37–70.
- 39.
For example, see “Jewish and Arab Communists Unite,” Jewish Life 3, no. 3 (1949). For an overview of the politics of these groups in this period, see Joel Beinin, Was the Red Flag Flying There?: Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel, 1948–1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 24–55. See also Amir Locker-Biletzki, “Colonialism and Imperialism in Communist Thinking in Palestine/Israel, 1919–1965,” Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 3 (2018): 384–399.
- 40.
See also R.S. Gordon, “The Arab Left Wing,” New Life 1, no. 5 (1947).
- 41.
Young Communist League of Israel, “Israeli Youth Calls to World Youth,” Jewish Life 2, no. 2 (1948).
- 42.
Ibid. See Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988).
- 43.
The period after the UN’s partition decision and before the establishment of the state of Israel and the subsequent invasion of the Arab states’ armies. Ariella Azoulay, “Civil Alliances – Palestine, 1947–1948,” Settler Colonial Studies 4, no. 4 (2014): 413–433.
- 44.
For explorations of these possibilities, or more often the lack of possibilities, for co-operation, see Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Deborah Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries: Jewish and Arab Workers in Mandatory Palestine (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2000); Menachem Klein, Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Hebron (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
- 45.
See Ilana Kaufman, “Communists and the 1948 War: PCP, Maki, and the National Liberation League,” Journal of Israeli History 33, no. 2 (2014): 115–144; Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006). For discussions of Mapam’s approach to Palestinian refugees, see Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 184–187; Beinin, Was the Red Flag, 31–39. For the involvement of the Haganah at Deir Yassin, see Irene L. Gendzier, Dying to Forget: Oil, Power, Palestine, & the Foundations of U.S. Policy in the Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 123.
- 46.
Mendes suggests that the Jewish Council distributed 25,000 copies of this pamphlet. Mendes, “The Australian Left’s Support,” 144. Norman Rothfield suggests that 100,000 were distributed of both, with the assistance of trade unions and churches. Rothfield, Many Paths to Peace, 21.
- 47.
Rothfield, Israel Reborn.
- 48.
C. Venn Pilcher, “Jewish Achievements Have Benefited Palestine Arabs,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 1, no. 4 (1948).
- 49.
While there was only a passing reference to the Palestinian refugees in New Life, Jewish Life printed a very sympathetic interview in January 1949 with the ‘Arab progressives’ which highlighted the issue of the refugees. Jewish Life went on to press for the return of the refugees in an August 1949 editorial. “Israel’s Arab Problem,” New Life 2, no. 6 (1948); A.B. Magil, “I Meet the Arab Progressives,” Jewish Life 3, no. 3 (1949); “Cold War Against Israel,” Jewish Life 3, no. 10 (1949). This was despite this stance being, at the time, the policy of the United States and of no interest to the USSR. On the changing positions of the United States on the refugee issue circa 1948–1949, see Gendzier, Dying to Forget, 201–239.
- 50.
After 1953 the Jewish Council returned to a consistently pro-Israel position, following closely the line of the Mapam party, see Philip Mendes, “The ‘Declining’ Years of the Melbourne Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism, 1954–1970,” Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal 17, pt.3 (2004): 3–5.
- 51.
H.B. Newman, “Israel Has Restored Our Dignity!,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 2, no. 2 (1949).
- 52.
L. Harry Gould, “Socialism the Solution,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 2, no. 2 (1949).
- 53.
G. de Vahl Davis, “New State – New Problems,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 2, no. 2 (1949).
- 54.
N. Jacobson, “Nearer the Solution,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 2, no. 2 (1949); Dr. A. Cymerman, “Free from ‘Galuth’ Psychology,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 2, no. 2 (1949).
- 55.
H. Brezniak, “There Is No Neutrality,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 2, no. 2 (1949).
- 56.
Ibid. According to Paul Morawetz one of the central reasons why he resigned from the Jewish Council was the ambivalence around Israel. Morawetz suggested that in particular Norman Rothfield and Judah Waten wanted a new neutral position on Israel as they were suspicious that it was ‘an outcrop of nationalism, that Israel was in a way an imperialist design and that the Jews might become imperialists in Israel themselves and that the Jabotinsky line might be pursued’. “Notes from Peter Medding’s interview with Paul Morawetz” (papers of Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism, State Library of Victoria, MS 14257, undated).
- 57.
Zusman was notably given the final word in the symposium. Nate Zusman, “Self-Respect and Democracy – the Solution,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 2, no. 3 (1949).
- 58.
Ibid.
- 59.
For an exploration of such disavowals as common across settler colonial imaginaries, see Lorenzo Veracini, “Settler Collective, Founding Violence and Disavowal: The Settler Colonial Situation,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 29, no. 4 (2008): 363–379.
- 60.
The Jewish Council Annual Report for 1949–1950 is striking for the complete absence of any mention of Israel. “Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism Annual Report 1949–1950” (University of Melbourne Archives, Norman Rothfield Collection, 2002.0014, Box 1).
- 61.
As Hannah Arendt suggests, the category of ‘Jewishness’ as something quantifiable and subject to internal contestation was only possible as a result of modern Jewish emancipation and assimilation. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 83–84.
- 62.
For an account of the fortunes of this journal, see Louise Hoffman, “A Review of the Jewish Press in Western Australia,” Journal of the Royal Western Australian Historical Society 8, no. part 2 (1978).
- 63.
The AJO was against what it called ‘political Zionism’, which aimed at the creation of an independent Jewish State. It was in favour of ‘Zionism as a humanitarian and cultural movement designed to facilitate the migration to Palestine of Jews who, because of racial and religious discrimination, cannot or will not live in the country of their birth or adoption.’ “The ‘Australian Jewish Outlook’: Editorial Policy Outlined,” Australian Jewish Outlook 1, no. 1 (1947).
- 64.
For a more favourable discussion of the sort of politics represented by the AJO, embodied by Isaac Isaacs, see John Docker, 1492: The Poetics of Diaspora (London and New York: Continuum, 2001), 171–188. Despite on the surface there being little in common politically between the AJO perspective and a Jewish left analysis, there were a number of echoes, particularly in their scepticism of Zionism. By 1946, Isaac Isaacs was a weekly visitor to the Jewish Council offices, advising them on legal matters and adding his name to official approaches to government. Rabbi Raymond Apple, “Isaacs & Monash: The Jewish Connection,” Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal 11, pt. 6 (1993): 985–999. According to Rothfield, Isaacs ‘remained a staunch supporter until his death’ in 1948. Rothfield, Many Paths to Peace, 21.
- 65.
See the ASIO file “Jewish Unity Association” for evidence of the different approaches of The Voice and Unity.
- 66.
“The ‘Australian Jewish Outlook’: Editorial Policy Outlined.”
- 67.
Shalom Ratzaby, “The Polemic About the ‘Negation of the Diaspora’ in the 1930s and Its Roots,” Journal of Israeli History 16, no. 1 (1995): 19–38.
- 68.
Ibid. See also Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Exile Within Sovereignty: Toward a Critique of the ‘Negation of Exile’ in Israeli Culture,” Theory and Criticism, no. 4 and 5 (1993): 23–56, 113–132.
- 69.
Daniel H. Weiss, “A Nation without Borders?: Modern European Emancipation as Negation of Galut,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 34, no. 4 (2016): 72. This notion of nationhood does not imply a modern concept of nation as produced by modern nationalism. See also Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Jewish Memory Between Exile and History,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 97, no. 4 (2007): 530–543.
- 70.
Weiss, “A Nation without Borders?”
- 71.
Cited in ibid., 80. For a discussion of Jews and the French Revolution, see Maurice Samuels, The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 17–49; David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019), 91–101. For a discussion of Jewish emancipation and the emergence of modern antisemitism, see Wolfe, Traces of History, 85–111.
- 72.
The origins of this ideology lie with the maskilim of the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment who venerated the state, seeking to turn Jews into individual state citizens above all else. David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 98–117.
- 73.
David J. Benjamin, “The Case for the Racial Group,” Australian Jewish Outlook 1, no. 8 (1947); Philip Masel, “The Case for the Religious Group,” Australian Jewish Outlook 1, no. 8 (1947); S. Stedman, “The Case for the National Group,” Australian Jewish Outlook 1, no. 8 (1947).
- 74.
Philip Masel, “The Case for the Religious Group.”
- 75.
Ibid. For a discussion of the transformation of the idea of Judaism into a ‘religion’ rather than a political entity, see Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Daniel Boyarin, Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion (Rutgers University Press, 2018).
- 76.
Benjamin, “The Case for the Racial Group.”
- 77.
Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 165–206.
- 78.
Stedman, “The Case for the National Group.”
- 79.
For a discussion of the ‘nationalisation’ of the Bund within Zionist historiography, see Roni Gechtman, “Nationalising the Bund? Zionist Historiography and the Jewish Labour Movement,” East European Jewish Affairs 43, no. 3 (2013): 249–264.
- 80.
Stedman, “The Case for the National Group.”
- 81.
See David N. Myers, “On the Idea of a Jewish Nation: Before and after Statism,” Perush 1 (2009).
- 82.
This account was contained in a withering critique of the AJO as a ‘medley of ignorance and treachery towards those who in this crucial hour of our history are at one with the people’. A. L. Patkin, “An ‘Australian Jewish Outlook’,” The Zionist, June 1947.
- 83.
Levy’s analysis of what constituted a nation was informed by Joseph Stalin’s 1913 definition of a national group, see Joseph Stalin, “Marxism and the National Question,” in Marxism and the National and Colonial Question (Moscow: Co-operative Pub. Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1935), 3–53.
- 84.
Hyman Levy, “What Is a Nation?,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 1, no. 2 (1948). Levy expanded upon this in his 1958 booklet Jews and the National Question (London: Hillway Publishing Company, 1958).
- 85.
The Jewish left historical materialist account of Jewish history is set out comprehensively in a series of articles by Moses Miller published in Jewish Life disputing a nationalist (or religion-based) Jewish historiography, see Moses Miller, “Zionism and the State of Israel : 1,” Jewish Life 3, no. 7 (1949); “Zionism and the State of Israel : II,” Jewish Life 3, no. 8 (1949); “Zionism and the State of Israel: III,” Jewish Life 3, no. 9 (1949); “Zionism and the State of Israel : IV,” Jewish Life 3, no. 10 (1949); “Zionism and the State of Israel : V,” Jewish Life 3, no. 11 (1949). For Miller both a nationalist and a religious interpretation of Jewish history were founded on an idealist conception of a national or divine will as historical subject, discounting material factors.
- 86.
Hyman Levy, “A Letter to Jewish Intellectuals,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 1, no. 3 (1948).
- 87.
The ‘national’ in this case did not refer to all Jews constituting a nation but to the historically determined case of Yiddish-speaking Russian and Eastern European Jews who constituted a particular cultural-linguistic group, see Roni Gechtman, “Jews and Non-Territorial Autonomy: Political Programmes and Historical Perspectives,” Ethnopolitics 15, no. 1 (2016): 72–77; Roni Gechtman, “National-Cultural Autonomy and ‘Neutralism’: Vladimir Medem’s Marxist Analysis of the National Question, 1903–1920,” Socialist Studies 3, no. 1 (2007): 75–77.
- 88.
Gertrud Pickhan, “Yiddishkayt and Class Consciousness: The Bund and Its Minority Concept,” East European Jewish Affairs 39, no. 2 (2009): 255–259; Mario Kessler, “The Bund and the Labour and Socialist International,” in Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100, ed. Jack Jacobs (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001).
- 89.
Pickhan, “Yiddishkayt and Class Consciousness,” 258–259; Roni Gechtman, “Nationalising the Bund?”
- 90.
For an account of this political clash, see Gechtman, “A ‘Museum of Bad Taste’?”; Yoav Peled, “Lenin on the Jewish Question: The Theoretical Setting,” Political Studies 35 (1987): 61–78.
- 91.
Jack Jacobs, Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2009).
- 92.
Gechtman, “A ‘Museum of Bad Taste’?,” 64.
- 93.
Isabelle Tombs, “Erlich and Alter, ‘the Sacco and Vanzetti of the USSR’: An Episode in the Wartime History of International Socialism,” Journal of Contemporary History 23, no. 4 (1988): 531–549; Shimon Redlich, “The Erlich-Alter Affair,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 9, no. 2 (1979): 24–45. While Erlich was believed murdered until after the fall of the Soviet Union, he in fact killed himself in an NKVD prison. Lucian Dobroszycki, “Last Hours of Erlich Emerge in Red Files. Hero of the Bund Killed Himself in May 1942,” Forward, Dec. 11, 1992: 1–2. I am indebted to Jack Jacobs for this correction and reference.
- 94.
The Bund in Australia was given assistance by Arthur Calwell in publicising the apparent murders of Erlich and Alter. David Slucki, The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945 (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 140.
- 95.
Ibid., 157–158. Clare Fester, “Migrant Politics and the New Australians Council, 1955–59” (Monash University, 2013), 27–42. The two factions previously had an uneasy alliance, see Slucki, International Jewish Labor Bund, 140.
- 96.
See Chap. 5 of this book.
- 97.
For an account of these dynamics, see Fester, “Migrant Politics”; Slucki, International Jewish Labor Bund, 151–159; David Rechter, “Beyond the Pale: Jewish Communism in Melbourne” (University of Melbourne, 1986), 148–149.
- 98.
Morris U. Schappes, “Resistance Is the Lesson,” Jewish Life 2, no. 6 (1948).
- 99.
A. Shulman, “The Melbourne Bund – A Skit,” Australian Jewish Forum 6, no. 44 (1946). Also see the incident at the Kadimah as outlined in Chap. 5.
- 100.
Slucki, International Jewish Labor Bund, 148.
- 101.
Sam Goldbloom, interview by Suzanne Rutland, 12 April 1988, State Library of New South Wales, Suzanne Rutland collection, CY MLOH 437/135; Rothfield, Many Paths to Peace; Itzhak Gust, Such Was Life: A Jum** Narrative from Radom to Melbourne (Caulfield South, VIC: Makor Jewish Community Library, 2004).
- 102.
Slucki, International Jewish Labor Bund, 165–167.
- 103.
Ibid., 144–145.
- 104.
Susan Bach, “The Kadimah: 1911–1961” (Monash University, 1979).
- 105.
Richard Haese, Modern Australian Art (New York: Alpine Fine Arts Collection, 1982), 235.
- 106.
Emily Alice Katz, Bringing Zion Home: Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948–1967 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), 13–16.
- 107.
Suzanne Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia (Rose Bay: Brandl & Schlesinger 1997), 259–273; Medding, Assimilation to Group Survival, 18–26.
- 108.
For instance, see M. Kusher, “The Jewish Cultural Conference: Critical Comments,” Australian Jewish Forum 8, no. 71 (1948).
- 109.
Pinchas Goldhar, “Jewish Antisemitism,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 1, no. 2 (1948).
- 110.
Ibid.
- 111.
There is a long history of Jewish campaigns against Yiddish. After the maskilim of the Jewish enlightenment, these campaigns were taken up by the Zionists. Dovid Katz, Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 176–186, 232–238. For an examination of both the importance of language to the ideology of Zionism along with a history that contradicts that ideology in Palestine, see Yael Chaver, What Must Be Forgotten: The Survival of Yiddish in Zionist Palestine (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2004); Liora R. Halperin, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920–1948 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
- 112.
For a rather partisan history of Mt Scopus during this period, see Benzion Patkin, Heritage and Tradition: The Emergence of Mount Scopus College (Melbourne: Hawthorn Press, 1972). Benzion Patkin was the nephew of Aaron Patkin and the driving force behind Mt Scopus’ establishment. There were differing views within the Jewish Council on the establishment of Mt Scopus. Norman Rothfield and the majority of the council were opposed, whereas Walter Lippmann was in favour and Joseph Redapple became the school’s first treasurer. Ibid., 106–116.
- 113.
“Editorial – Yiddish in the Day School,” The Zionist, August-September (1948).
- 114.
See Jordana Silverstein, Anxious Histories: Narrating the Holocaust in Jewish Communities at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015), 99–131; Barbara Bloch, “Unsettling Zionism: Diasporic Consciousness & Australian Jewish Identities” (University of Western Sydney, 2005), 120–190.
- 115.
“Great Cultural Institution in Israel,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 2, no. 4 (1949).
- 116.
Ibid.
- 117.
David Martin, “The Yid and the Hebrew,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 2, no. 2 (1949). David Martin joined Unity’s editorial board on his arrival in Australia, having been a former literary editor for New Life.
- 118.
Koestler was something of a bête noire of the Jewish left internationally, see A.B. Magil, “Koestler’s Evil Journey,” Jewish Life 4, no. 4 (1950).
- 119.
For an elaboration on this theme in the interwar period, see Naomi Brenner, Lingering Bilingualism: Modern Hebrew & Yiddish Literatures in Contact (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2016).
- 120.
Chaver, What Must Be Forgotten.
- 121.
Martin, “The Yid and the Hebrew.”
- 122.
Hyam Brezniak, interview by Hazel de Berg, 29 April 1975, National Library of Australia, Hazel de Berg collection.
- 123.
Dr. Joachim Schneeweiss, “Whither the Yiddish Theatre,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 2, no. 3 (1949); Pinchas Goldhar, “The Funeral,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 2, no. 4 (1949); Hertz Bergner, “Yosel Birzstein’s First Book of Poetry,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 2, no. 4 (1949).
- 124.
Judah L. Waten, “Yiddish Literature in Australia,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 1, no. 3 (1948).
- 125.
More on this in Chap. 6.
- 126.
“Book Review: Goldhar’s Collected Works,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 3, no. 1 (1950).
- 127.
George Berger, “Book Review: An Unusual Monument to an Unusual People,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 2, no. 1 (1949).
- 128.
Ibid.
- 129.
Alfred Ruskin, “The Melbourne Scene,” in Community of Fate: Memoirs of German Jews in Melbourne, ed. John Foster (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 103; Robert Exiner, “From the Spree to the Yarra: Memories of an Emigration,” Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal 12, pt. 3 (1994): 536–558. German Jews speaking Yiddish in Melbourne are also featured in Pinchas Goldhar, “Café in Carlton,” in Southern Stories, Poems and Paintings (Melbourne: Dolphin Publications, 1945). The interest in Yiddish, as not just culturally but politically important, was echoed in a review of a new textbook by Morris Schappes in Jewish Life: ‘Now of course Yiddish is a language, and the fight for respect for that language is part of the struggle for the equality of the Jewish people, and therefore is part of the class struggle’. Morris U. Schappes, “Yiddish Grammar in English,” Jewish Life 4, no. 2 (1949).
- 130.
Goldhar is the Yiddishist exception here, see Pam Maclean, “‘Jewish Life Appears to be Frozen, Static, Like a Puppet Play’: Pinchas Goldhar’s Struggle for Yiddish Cultural Authenticity in Australia,” Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal 23, pt. 3 (2017): 491–500. For a partial history of Yiddishism as a cultural-political movement, see Katz, Words on Fire, 264–278. See also Cecile Esther Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
- 131.
See Frances Butwin, “Book Review: A New Translation of Peretz,” Jewish Life 2, no. 3 (1948).
- 132.
L. Chaim, “Words and the Tricks They Play,” Unity: A Magazine of Jewish Affairs 1, no. 1 (1948).
- 133.
See also J.B. Jackson, “Yiddish,” New Life 1, no. 2 (1947).
- 134.
Waten, “Yiddish Literature in Australia.”
- 135.
J.B. Jackson, “A Matter of Importance: A Reply to Mr Koenig,” New Life 1, no. 6 (1947).
- 136.
For a brief personal account of the then emerging multiculturalism within the Jewish community, see Miriam Kuna, “Castles in Caulfield,” Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal 16, pt. 3 (2002): 317–318.
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Kaiser, M. (2022). The Jewish Left, Zionism, and the Diaspora. In: Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10123-6_4
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