A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York
by Tony Michels
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Description
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 show more 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. show lessTags
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History of Russian Jews immigrant organizationsin late 19th c/early 20th c America
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Good Nonfiction about New York City
62 works; 10 members
Works Cited in The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter
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Author Information
2 Works 88 Members
Tony Michels is George L. Mosse Associate Professor of American Jewish History, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
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Common Knowledge
- Important places
- New York, New York, USA
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, History, Economics, General Nonfiction, Politics and Government, Religion & Spirituality
- DDC/MDS
- 335.0092 — Society, government, & culture Economics Socialism and related systems Standard subdivisions History, geographic treatment, biography Biography
- LCC
- HX550 .J4 .M53 — Social sciences Socialism. Communism. Anarchism Socialism. Communism. Anarchism Communism/socialism in relation to special
- BISAC
Statistics
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- 61
- Popularity
- 492,287
- Reviews
- 1
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 3
- ASINs
- 2
