THE RADICAL JEWISH TRADITION

To the barricades.

There was a time, wrote the novelist Grace Paley, when “to be Jewish was to be socialist.” As this book argues, “Jews and their interests were an integral part of the radical tradition and vice versa.” Gluckstein and Stone, authors and activists, contend that the heart of Jewish activism came from the oppressions of Western capitalism. By placing monetary value on labor, goods, and services, capitalism stifled communal life and, in the process, privileged individual achievement. The story of the Jews is, thus, a story of achievement in the face of—or in the service of—capitalist oppression. A unique strain of radical politics grew out of urban Jewry’s identification with a laboring class. Such class identity shaped socialist and anarchist movements of the late-19th and 20th centuries. But the authors maintain that it also informs a contemporary social conscience—a shared belonging with all groups oppressed by neoliberal valuation. Today, they write, a people are not so much a group of human beings as they are impediments to resource extraction. The social engineering of the kibbutz movement, for these authors, represents a blend of leftist communal resistance and land settlement. The book, then, polemicizes leftist tendencies in modern Judaism to make a case for a distinctively anti-Zionist position. Even though Zionism emerged at the nexus of socialist secularism and revanchist politics, it has become, in the view of the authors, the instrument of “a hierarchy of oppression.” They write, “The radical Jewish tradition…shows the explosive power of a movement combining resistance with oppression and exploitation.” The book is a call to arms for people “who engage in the struggle to transform the world” into a place of righteous equality.

A thought-provoking history of Jewish radical movements sounded as an appeal for modern political liberation.