The Jewish Radical Tradition: Revolutionaries, Resistance Fighters and Firebrands

This timely book is an excellent antidote to any attempt to de-historicise conflicts such as the one raging in historical Palestine. This de-contextualisation underlies the Israeli and Zionist narratives still dominating mainstream media and politics in Britain and beyond. Pre-Zionist Jewish life and culture, in particular in its Marxist and radical forms, as this book so succinctly proves, invalidates the absurd attempt to equate Zionism with Judaism and anti-Zionism with antisemitism. This book is about the left that was and should return and about the Jewish role in it as a heritage of relentless struggle against racism, imperialism, and Zionism.

Nowhere else will you find a coherent account of the Jewish socialist tradition’s currents in eastern Europe, London, and New York. Its fascinating stories are framed by convincing arguments that working class struggles for liberation, united across ethnic and religious lines, are possible and essential. The tradition is counterposed to the Zionist fable that Jews can achieve security through militarism and colonisation.