A WORKER’S PARADISE WITHIN A WORKER’S PARADISE

The Jewishness of Communism is best illustrated by the admissions of Jewish scholars in Jewish reference works. The latest example is Jerusalem on the Amur: Birobidzhan and the Canadian Jewish Communist Movement, 1924-1951” by Henry Felix Srebrnik. From Chapter Four, “Canadian ICOR Branches: The First Decade, 1925-1935” we read (ICOR was Association for Jewish Colonization in the Soviet Union):

“For many Jewish immigrant radicals in Canada, their actual country of residence was irrelevant: in their own minds, they lived in ‘America’. It was natural, then, that Canadian supporters of Birobidzhan readily involved themselves in the work of ICOR; in fact, the Canadian ICOR at first functioned as a section of the United States based organization.

From 1917 on, many Canadian Jews gave uncritical support to the country that emerged from the Bolshevik Revolution. Some even moved to the USSR to take part in the building of a socialist society. A significant minority became involved, either as members or sympathizers, with the Communist Party of Canada (CPC). Founded in 1921, the CPC by 1927 had formed a National Jewish Bureau, a subcommittee of the party’s central committee, with members in Montreal, Toronto and Winnipeg. According to historian David Rome, the Jewish group was the most vital faction in the Canadian Communist movement. (emphasis added) ‘It was a total society with its own political and cultural institutes.’ The Jewish Communists, in particular, felt duty-bound to ‘counteract the nationalist, imperialist Zionist movement’ by demonstrating that the Soviet Union had ‘the only true and sensible solution ‘to the national question’. Winnipeg’s North End, home to most of that city’s 15,000 or so Jews, was a hotbed of radical politics, and among the Jews, its cultural life was dominated by secular Yiddishists, to the extent that ‘the strongest of Winnipeg’s Jewish political orgaizations…were leftist.’ As the Winnipeg district bureau of the CPC stated in a resolution passed at a meeting in January 1930, it was necessary to rally Jewish support for the USSR ‘upon the basis of the national aspirations of the Jewish people.’ (emphasis added) Indeed, the struggle between the Jewish Communists and their opponents for leadership of the Jewish working class was a ‘hallmark of the immigrant community during the inter-war period’.

In his study of the American Jewish left, Arthur Liebman has referred to the various Jewish fraternal orders, newspapers, and unions grouped around the Communist Party as having constituted a distinct ‘Jewish Left’ subculture. This was also the case in Canada. Communists active in the Jewish community encouraged the formation of organizations that would appeal to Jews interested in preserving their Jewish culture in non-Zionist ways. Their strategy was to combat ethnic nationalism while harnessing feelings of Jewish identity to the class struggle. A variety of these ‘front’ organizations operated in the Jewish community, especially among its large urban working class. Yiddish language pro-Soviet groups, comprised mainly of eastern European working-class immigrants, were in particular concerned with Soviet treatment of its Jewish population and were impressed by the decision to found a Jewish national territory in the far east. Organizations such as the Friends of the Soviet Union (FSU), formed in 1930, grew in numbers and influence in the Jewish community. Specifically Jewish groups were also created as tension between anti-Soviet social democrats and pro-Soviet radicals grew, particularly in theWC (Workers Councils/Arbayter Rings), which had, in 1922, at its Toronto national conference, condemned Soviet style Communism. In 1923, the Jewish Communists in Toronto opened a Frayhat club and organized the Jewish Women’s Labour League (Yidishye Arbayter Froyen Farayn), which raised money to buy tractors for Birobidzhan. The Froyen Farayn also organized a children’s camp, Kindervelt, on Lake Ontario in 1925. One year later, the Communists broke away from the WC altogether and formed the Labour League. In Winnipeg, radical Jewish women formed the Mister Faryan, or Mother’s League, in 1919. The Jewish Communists also founded a weekly newspaper, “Der Kampf”, in November 1924.” (pp.70-71)

Although Henry Srebrnik is here writing only of the Canadian Jewish enthusiasm for the Soviet Birobidzhan project, the 1928 Soviet scheme for creating a Jewish autonomous region in Siberia adjacent to Japanese occupied Manchukuo, what he writes is consistent with virtually all Jewish attitudes toward Communism in the inter-war period. Birobidzhan was an effort to satisfy the old Marxist dialectical conflict between international socialism which was to solve the age old “Jewish problem” and the Marxist-Zionist desire for Jewish “cultural autonomy”. In the later pages of his book Henry Srebrnik discusses the aging Chaim Zhitlovsky who was one of the main synthesizers of this thesis. “Jerusalem on the Amur” is a specialized study and does not address the Jewish involvement in Communism as a whole. Nevertheless, Henry Srebrnik cannot discuss the Canadian Jewish involvement in the Birobidzhan colonial scheme without discussing it as a component of a whole. And Canadian Jewry, like Jewry everywhere of the inter-war period, was absolutely flush with enthusiasm for the workers paradise and its allegedly wonderful achievements. This is clearly indicated in the lengthy quotation with which this essay began. The number of Canadian Jewish Communists described in the pages of “Jerusalem on the Amur” is legion. Melech Epstein, Joshua German, Joseph Glassman, Abraham Reisen, Jacob Levin, Gina Medem, Leon Talmy, Sam Lepedus, Sam Carr, Norman Fried, Bill Sidney, Reuben Brainin, Moishe Katz, Elias Wattenberg, Max and Annie Dolgoy, Labl Basman, Noah Levin, Philip Halpern, Israel Rabinowitch, Israel Medres, Mordecai Ginsberg, B.G. Sack, Rabbi Abraham Bick, Fred Rose, Max Bailey, Rose Bronstein, A.B. Rosenberg, Harry Guralnick, Joseph Zuken, Berel Silverberg, Paul Phillips, on and on the list goes.

Clearly, Canadian Jewish enthusiasm for the workers paradise in the Soviet far east was no insubstantial thing. A fair number of Canadian Jews not merely enthused for Birobidzhan but actually left to live there. In this they followed the example of a great many Jews in the U.S. and England who also emigrated back to Russia after the 1917 revolution. The process was repeated in the Depression decade of the 1930’s when substantial numbers of American and Canadian Jews also fled back to Russia. Thus, the Jewish romance with Birobidzhan was part of a larger Jewish love affair with Communism generally. Ultimately, the Jewish infatuation with Birobidzhan faded. There were various factors involved, the most important of which were the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the removal of the Jewish commissars in Iron Curtain Europe starting around 1950. But before the creation of the Zionist state the lure of Birobidzhan, the Jewish autonomous republic in the Soviet Union, was one of the main devices by which the Jewish Communists attempted to lure the Marxist Jewish masses away from the siren call of Zionism. Communism, not a British imperialist adventure in the Middle East, would give Jews both the Jewish nationality – and the Marxism – that they craved.