For the first time, this volume centers the rich but little known history of radical Jewish politics in the Middle East and North Africa and puts it into conversation with developments in the Americas, South Africa, Soviet Asia, and Europe. Jews were attracted to radical politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to transform the societies they lived in but also out of a deep desire to belong. Somewhat paradoxically, then, radical politics held out the enticing possibility of normalization for Jews, even as it frequently resulted in their further alienation or persecution. In some cases, Jewish radicals sought recognition and autonomy as Jews; in others, Jews labored to be accepted as full-fledged citizens of their home countries; in still others, they tried to escape Jewishness altogether.  Jewish experiences of modernity, colonialism, race, nationalism, emancipation, war, and migration, serve as the connective tissue that binds together radical Jewish politics from Baghdad to Buenos Aires.
 

NATHANIEL DEUTSCH is Distinguished Professor of History and Baumgarten Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of a number of award winning books, including The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement, for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

ALMA RACHEL HECKMAN is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging.

TONY MICHELS 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, which won the Salo Baron Prize for Best First Book in Jewish Studies.

Contents
Introduction: Global Radical Jewish Politics by Nathaniel Deutsch, Alma Rachel Heckman, and Tony Michels

Section I: The Middle East and North Africa
Chapter 1: Radicalism, Emancipation, and Nationalism: The Story of Moroccan Jewish Communists by Alma Rachel Heckman
Chapter 2: Between Gallicism and Communism: Jews and Politics in Tunisia (1881-1945) by Kamilia Rahmouni
Chapter 3: “Yes, we are native Algerian Jews…”: The Anti-Colonialist Jews of Algeria (ca. 1920-co. 1970) by Pierre-Jean Le Foll Luciani (translated from the French by Jane Teresa Kuntz)
Chapter 4: Communist Jews and Egypt’s Struggle for National Liberation by Rami Ginat
Chapter 5: Subjugated Homeland, Unhappy People – Iraqi Jewish Communist Women, 1941-1966 by Orit Bashkin
Chapter 6: The Roots of Jewish Radicalism in Iran by Lior Sternfeld
Chapter 7: Panthers and Leashes: A History of Mizrahi Radicalism by Dario Miccoli

Section II: The Americas, South Africa, and Asia
Chapter 8: A Century of Radical Jewish Politics in Argentina by Nathaniel Deutsch
Chapter 9: Jewish Radicals in Twentieth-Century Brazil by Michael Rom
Chapter 10: Jewish Radicals: the South African Experience by Milton Shain and Richard Mendelsohn
Chapter 11: Radical Jewish Politics in the Key of Land, Language, and Labor: the Birobidzhan Project

Section III: Eastern Europe and the Balkans
Chapter 12: Lithuania and the Making of the Jewish Working Class by Michael Casper
Chapter 13: Communists and Zionists in Hungary, 1945-1953 by Peter Kenez
Chapter 14: Jewish Radicalism between Ottoman Socialism and Greek Communism, 1908-1936 by Kostis Karpozilos and Paris Papamichos Chronakis

Section IV: Unorthodox Radicalisms
Chapter 15: Jewish Anarchism by Anna Elena Torres
Chapter 16: Politics of the Comparative Gaze: The Three Languages of Right-Wing Zionist Radicalism by Arie M. Dubnov
Chapter 17: Middle Eastern and North African Jews in the Irgun and Lehu in British Mandatory Palestine by Avery Weinman

Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Index