From Baghdad to Buenos Aires: Radical Jewish Politics in Global Perspective

Why did so many Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries become revolutionaries? Ask the question in New York or Warsaw and you get one set of answers. In Baghdad, Casablanca, or Tehran, the story changes. Radical Jewish Politics: A Global Perspective, a new volume from Rutgers University Press, starts in the Middle East and North Africa, with Jewish communists in Iraq and Egypt and anticolonial fighters in Algeria and Tunisia, and zooms out to Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, and the Soviet Union. What emerges is a history of Jews who wanted to remake the world and, just as much, to find a place in it. Communism, anarchism, and anticolonial nationalism all promised that place, and all of them, sooner or later, demanded prison, exile, or Jewishness itself as the price. Editors Nathaniel Deutsch and Alma Rachel Heckman of UC Santa Cruz and Tony Michels of the University of Wisconsin at Madison join us to talk about what this new global view reveals.