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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Tony Michels. A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2005. Pp. viii, 335. $27.95.
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| Tony Michels is intent on refocusing scholarly attention upon those articulate and committed Yiddish-speaking radicals who had their say and influence on New York's Jewish masses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Writing in the spirit of Irving Howe—who, some thirty years ago, seemingly closed the book on the sagas of these dynamic champions of revolutionary thought, economic freedom, and social justice—Michels is out to remind historians not only of their impact on immigrant lives on the Lower East Side. But he also asserts that what New York Yiddish socialists had to say, beginning in the 1880s, still resonated with the children and grandchildren of these Jewish newcomers for "roughly" the next eighty years. Michels offers a thoughtful alternate voice to what he sees as an American Jewish narrative that speaks increasingly and exclusively of American Jews "making it" in this country, abandoning or "liberalizing" their radical past in their quest for economic mobility and social acculturation even as they struggled to redefine their ethnic identities. |
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