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4%OFFTony Michels - A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York - 9780674032439 - V9780674032439
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A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York

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Description for A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York Paperback. In a compelling history of the Jewish community in New York during four decades of mass immigration, this title examines the defining role of the Yiddish socialist movement in the American Jewish experience. Num Pages: 352 pages, 23 halftones. BIC Classification: 1KBBEY; 3JJ; HBTB; JFSR1; JPFF. Category: (G) General (US: Trade); (UF) Further/Higher Education. Dimension: 202 x 128 x 28. Weight in Grams: 386.
In a compelling history of the Jewish community in New York during four decades of mass immigration, Tony Michels examines the defining role of the Yiddish socialist movement in the American Jewish experience. The movement, founded in the 1880s, was dominated by Russian-speaking intellectuals, including Abraham Cahan, Mikhail Zametkin, and Chaim Zhitlovsky. Socialist leaders quickly found Yiddish essential to convey their message to the Jewish immigrant community, and they developed a remarkable public culture through lectures and social events, workers' education societies, Yiddish schools, and a press that found its strongest voice in the mass-circulation newspaper Forverts. Arguing against the view that socialism and Yiddish culture arrived as Old World holdovers, Michels demonstrates that they arose in New York in response to local conditions and thrived not despite Americanization, but because of it. And the influence of the movement swirled far beyond the Lower East Side, to a transnational culture in which individuals, ideas, and institutions crossed the Atlantic. New York Jews, in the beginning, exported Yiddish socialism to Russia, not the other way around. The Yiddish socialist movement shaped Jewish communities across the United States well into the twentieth century and left an important political legacy that extends to the rise of neoconservatism. A story of hopeful successes and bitter disappointments, A Fire in Their Hearts brings to vivid life this formative period for American Jews and the American left.

Product Details

Publisher
Harvard University Press United States
Number of pages
352
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2009
Condition
New
Weight
386g
Number of Pages
352
Place of Publication
Cambridge, Mass, United States
ISBN
9780674032439
SKU
V9780674032439
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 4 to 8 working days
Ref
99-2

About Tony Michels
Tony Michels is George L. Mosse Associate Professor of American Jewish History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Reviews for A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York
In November, 1917, New York's Jewish working class elected a slew of Socialist Party officials, including seven aldermen, ten state assemblymen, and a municipal judge. Huge crowds gathered around 'Trotsky Square' to celebrate. This informative... account traces the Jewish Socialist movement from its beginning, after the Russian pogroms of the eighteen-eighties, through its height, when revolutionaries like the German anarchist Johann Most made speeches on Lower East Side street corners, to its decline. - New Yorker More than 170,000 Germans settled in New York's lower East Side, carriers of the same tradition that had turned the German Social Democratic Party in the late nineteenth century into the strongest socialist party in the world. Their language, as Michels incisively points out, was the cradle of modern Yiddish in the United States. - Abraham Brumberg, Times Literary Supplement

Goodreads reviews for A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York


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