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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Daniel Stone, ed., Jewish Radicalism In Winnipeg, 1905–1960: Jewish Life and Times, Volume VIII (Winnipeg: Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada 2002)
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| THIS VOLUME is based on the proceedings of a conference sponsored by the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada in Winnipeg in 2001. The presenters at the three day conference were an interesting mix of scholars, many of whom were returning home to reflect on their experiences growing up within Winnipeg's progressive Jewish community (Leo Panitch, Alvin Finkel, Nelson Wiseman, Arthur Ross, Henry Srebrnik, and Michael Greenstein), historians associated with Winnipeg's Jewish Heritage Centre (Harry and Mildred Gutkin, Roz Usiskin, Henry Trachtenberg), and long-time activists in Winnipeg's Jewish Left. Among this group were prominent Jewish educator, D.I. Victor, Fred Narvey, an activist in the Progressive Arts Club, and Evelyn Katz, who attended the Arbeiter Ring School and the Peretz Folk Shule. Also, there were many spontaneous reflections offered by the nearly 200 participants in the conference, all of which were recorded and are now archived in the Jewish Heritage Centre. |
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This is an important collection because it documents and analyzes in one volume many aspects of the history of the Jewish Left in Winnipeg and offers reflections on the experiences of the Canadian Jewish Left in general. Mildred Gutkin's article focuses on the centrality of Yiddish to Jewish radical culture and explores its significance for Winnipeg's early Jewish working-class movement. Several other articles in the collection deepen one's appreciation of the strength of the cultural foundation of Winnipeg's pre-World War II vibrant Jewish working-class culture. Women were central to this cultural experience. Roz Usiskin argues that Jewish working-class women began to transform their traditional gender roles as they became increasingly active in unions and the activities of the radical Left. Ruth Frager explores similar concerns in her study of labour and the Left in Winnipeg, and Michael Greenstein examines the ways in which Jewish Left culture provided the context for the fictional writings of Adele Wisemen, Jack Ludwig, and Miriam Waddington. |
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Other articles focus on radical politics. Henry Trachtenberg's study of Jews and left-wing politics in Winnipeg's North End from 1919 to the 1940s contributes to an impressive literature that Trachtenberg has published on this subject. He argues that it was Jews' experience as immigrants in Winnipeg that radicalized them and led them to search out alliances with other North End working-class groups, in what Norman Penner once described as a "radical's paradise." |
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Henry Srebrnik provides a fascinating examination of Winnipeg Jews' support for the Birobidzhan project in the Soviet Union. This plan, advanced by Soviet Jews and supported by Lenin, called for the creation of a Jewish socialist homeland within the Birobidzhan region of eastern Russia. Until the late 1940s, many radical Jews in Europe and North America promoted this plan. Winnipeg was a centre of concerted efforts, Srebrnick demonstrates, to advance this project. The subject of this article is a cautionary tale for historians who see the activism of this earlier era though the prism of the Cold War. |
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Leo Panitch's keynote address to the conference, " Back to the Future: Contextualizing the Legacy," is an analytical, scholarly, and personal examination of the radical Yiddish milieu of the North End and the "web of political, ideological, cultural, and social relations, symbols and institutions that composed it, and the meaning they had on the most formative people in my youth, including my parents and my teachers at the Peretz Shul." The gradual disintegration of this Jewish radical culture in the 1950s is the subject of historian Alvin Finkel's article. He argues that improving prosperity brought class mobility for North End Jews, which combined with Cold War ideology, and disillusionment with Stalin's Russia, especially its growing anti-Semitism, explains the movement's decline after World War II. |
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There are in Jewish Radicalism other interesting articles and reminiscences that space does not permit me to explore. Together with the articles noted above, they make this collection a useful introduction to Jews and the Left in Winnipeg. |
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Nolan Reilly
University of Winnipeg |
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