Henry Felix Srebrnik, Dreams of Nationhood: American Jewish Communists and the Soviet Birobidzhan Project, 1924-1951.

Mendes, Philip

Henry Felix Srebrnik, Dreams of Nationhood: American Jewish Communists and the Soviet Birobidzhan Project, 1924-1951, Academic Studies Press, Boston, 2010. pp. xx + 289. US $75.00 cloth.

The Canadian Jewish academic Henry Srebrnik has long been an astute observer of the Jewish Left. His earlier 1995 study of the Jewish communist movement in Britain provided a rich insight into the blending of Jewish and Communist concerns. Here Srebrnik extends his analysis to the American Jewish Communist movement, and particularly their support for the strange Soviet plan to establish a Jewish national homeland in the isolated far east region of Birobidzhan.

The actual history of the Birobidzhan project has been covered extensively by other authors such as Robert Steinberg in his 1998 study, Stalin's Forgotten Zion. Srebrnik's major focus is rather on the American Jewish Communists organised in groups such as the Association for Jewish Colonisation in Russia (known as ICOR) and the Ambijan Committee, who provided political and financial backing to the project from the 1920s to the 1950s. Srebrnik situates the Birobidzhan project within the context of Jewish statelessness. For the first half of the twentieth century, many Jews were the wandering asylum seekers of their age, desperately seeking refuge from persecution. One response to this Jewish statelessness was territorialism, the proto-Zionist doctrine that emanated from the so-called Uganda Plan of 1903 that was ultimately rejected by Herzl and the Zionist movement. A number of similar plans emerged in the Soviet Union with the aim of promoting Jewish economic and cultural regeneration. These plans culminated in the 1928 Soviet approval of Birobidzhan as a Jewish national district. By 1932, 25,000 Jews lived in the district. Two years later it was declared a Jewish Autonomous Region, and it was also promised that when the Jewish population reached 100,000 or formed a majority that it would be declared an official Soviet republic. But this did not eventuate.

The Jewish Communists formed an important if not majority component of the American Communist Party, particularly in large cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Chicago. The American Jewish Communist sub-culture included both actual Party members and much larger numbers of secular Jewish radicals involved with affiliated trade unions, fraternal orders and newspapers. These were not self-hating or assimilated Jews alienated from their Jewish background. Rather, they were secular Jews who viewed themselves as promoting Jewish interests via participation in a worldwide movement for the liberation of Jews. Their commitment to the formation of a Jewish homeland in the Soviet Union reflected this alignment of non-Zionist ethnic identity and internationalist class politics.

They reached the apex of their support in the period from approximately 1941-49 when the Soviet Union was viewed favourably by most Jews. The visit of the two famous Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee leaders, Itzik Fefer and Shloime Mikhoels, to America in 1943 gave them enormous traction, as did the Soviet Union's support for the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. But the Cold War, including direct FBI pressure, and the increased allegations of Soviet anti-Semitism destroyed their support. The majority of this book details the activities and strategies of the various Birobidzhan support groups who included both Yiddish-speaking working class immigrants, and American-born English-speaking middle-class Jews. These organisations attracted thousands of members, raised millions of dollars for the Jewish Autonomous Republic, and played a significant role in shaping American Jewish opinion on key international issues.

Their key argument in favour of Birobidzhan was that the Soviet Union had eliminated anti-Semitism which was allegedly a punishable crime, and provided complete equality for its Jewish population. Not only that, but Birobidzhan offered a potential sanctuary for Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and other anti-Semitic European countries. Plans were even made to resettle thousands of Jewish orphans in the Soviet Union following the Holocaust. Prominent supporters of Birobidzhan included Albert Einstein, explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the artists Marc Chagall and Molly Picon, many liberal Rabbis, US Vice-President Henry Wallace, and a number of US Senators. Conversely, Jewish social democrats associated with the Workmen's Circle and the Forverts newspaper were sceptical from the very beginning.

Sadly, much of the Jewish communist support for Birobidzhan was based on delusions and gullibility. The first Stalinist purges of 1936-38 decimated the political and cultural leadership of the Jewish Autonomous Region. And later Stalin destroyed the entire Soviet Jewish intelligentsia between 1948 and 1953, including Fefer and Mikhoels. The victims tragically included two former American ICOR activists who had immigrated to the USSR in the early 1930s. These facts were revealed beyond any reasonable doubt by Khrushchev's 1956 revelations. Many Jewish communists realised that they had actually supported a regime which was murderously anti-Semitic rather than philo-Semitic. The nexus between Jews and Communism had come to an end.

PHILIP MENDES

Monash University