These times are horrific beyond words. In January the International Court of Justice found it to be plausible that the State of Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. At the time of writing over thirty-three thousand Palestinians – including over thirteen thousand children – have been killed in Gaza since Israel began its military response following the killing of approximately 1200 people in Israel by Hamas and other armed groups on October 7^th last year.

In this situation the overwhelming priority is an immediate end to Israeli military operations in Gaza, lifting the siege, Gaza’s residents being able to return to what is left of their homes, and the release of prisoners and hostages. In the West Bank, settler violence against Palestinian residents and the military’s use of ‘unlawful lethal force’ must also cease.

Habeeb Makhoul is a Palestinian citizen of Israel who spoke to the Jewish Diasporist podcast on 27th January. He argued that anti-Zionist Jews need to work urgently on the political persuasion of Zionist Jews in the diaspora to understand the full implications of the state of Israel and its actions for Palestinians as well as for Jews. The implications include the violence and slow death experienced by Palestinian workers in the West Bank that Ihab Maharmeh writes of in his piece for this series. The work of pushing back against the equation of anti-Zionism with anti-semitism in countries round the world is important because it can contribute to legitimating the struggle for Palestinian liberation.

There has been severe repression of pro-Palestinian voices in the media and politics in the Global North. This has been mixed with anti-Arab (specifically anti-Palestinian) racism as well as Islamophobia – take for example the US Congress vote on 7 November 2023 to censure Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib for her criticism of Israel, and MSNBC’s announcement the same month that it would be cancelling Mehdi Hasan’s regular show. No reason was given but this came after a robust interview with Israeli spokesperson Mark Regev. Germany has appointed state anti-semitism commissioners and is actively repressing Palestinian artists and writers as well as preventing expressions of collective solidarity with Palestinians, including by anti-Zionist Jewish Israeli citizens and other Jewish anti-Zionists in Germany.

Thanks to Left media outlets such as The Intercept, The Dig, Novara Media and Politics Theory Other, there have nevertheless been some very powerful and effective interviews with historians such as Professors Rashid Khalidi and Ussama Makdisi, that enable understanding of the colonial roots of Zionism, legal scholars such as Professor Noura Erakat, and Palestinian writer and poet Mohammed El-Kurd. Taken together, such broadcasts are particularly important for British audiences because public education in the UK about the continuing legacies of British colonialism in general and about Zionism in particular are both insufficient, and, such as they exist, have faced powerful attempts by politicians of both main parties to shut them down.

Appearing on the UK’s Channel 4 News the evening of the parliamentary debacle leading to no vote taking place on the Scottish National Party motion calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, Palestinian Ambassador Husam Zomlot reminded viewers of the UK’s pivotal role in the creation of the State of Israel. The actions of anti-semitic political leaders such as Balfour and Churchill in the enablement of the formation of a Jewish state in historic Palestine is too little understood in the UK. The UK’s (and the US’s) continuing geopolitical and military-industrial-commercial interests in funding and arming Israel also need to be better understood. 

Understanding the ongoing strategic interests of the US and the UK in the existence of a Jewish supremacist state form in historical Palestine, is at the heart of understanding Zionism. Anti-Zionism that advocates for all residents in historic Palestine to have the same political, cultural, social and economic rights is anti-imperialist. But it is not anti-semitic. The public needs reminding that the largest pro-Israel lobbying group in the US is Christians United for Israel with over ten million members.

The Jewish Bloc for Palestine 

Since Israel’s most recent military campaign in Gaza began in October last year, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the UK has organised regular marches in London and around the country to make an urgent case for an immediate ceasefire. These marches have drawn much negative attention from leading politicians from both parties. They have been portrayed as ‘hate marches’, as ‘extremist’ and have increasingly been under the threat of tighter restrictions and harsher policing. In contrast to the ‘hate marches’ trope, I would argue on the contrary that the marches resonate with a wider non-sectarian, coalitional politics, advocating for what Bal Sokhi-Bulley in her contribution to this series refers to as ‘collective well-being’.

One aspect of the marches that I have participated in is the Jewish Bloc for Palestine. The Jewish Bloc is a coalition of Jewish organisations, including those that are explicitly anti-Zionist and others that oppose Israel’s occupation and apartheid. The Palestinian Solidarity Campaign made a short film about the Jewish Bloc which helps to show the power of coalitional work against Zionism and demonstrates that anti-Zionism does not equate with anti-semitism.

A Jewish Radical Tradition

I’ve been thinking about some historical resources that could expand on the Jewish Bloc’s existing connections with a Jewish radical tradition that always stands with the oppressed against any oppressor, and believes that no one is free until all are free. It is internationalist and anti-imperialist and opposed to the political Zionist logic of ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism, especially, as Makdisi has explained, in its colonial Zionism form, since the end of World War One.

Such resources are available in a range of Jewish languages, including languages associated with Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish traditions. Yiddish was the language of Ashkenazi Jews in the Pale of Settlement in Tsarist Russia – including parts of present day Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and Lithuania, which demarcated areas where Jews were permitted to live between 1791 and 1917.

Following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, huge repression included pogroms of Jews. David Edelstat, revolutionary Yiddish poet, lived from 1866 to 1892. His short life and his work were the subject of Ori Kritz’s 1993 Yale University PhD thesis, ‘The poetics of anarchy: David Edelstat’s revolutionary poetry’. Born and brought up in Russia outside the Pale of Settlement, Edelstat’s mother tongue was Russian rather than Yiddish. He was one of 400,000 Russian Jews who moved to the US in the 1880s. According Kritz, Edelstat learned Yiddish not because he believed in Jewish distinctiveness. On the contrary as part of a new socialist movement consisting of many radical groups he was ‘imbued with the cosmopolitan spirit of socialism’. But, like other Russian Jewish intellectuals, he realized he had to use Yiddish as ‘the medium of expression and propaganda’ because it was ‘the only language the masses [ie working class Jewish immigrants] all understood.’ Poetry was a very significant medium of socialist propaganda at the time, and where there were large numbers of Yiddish-speaking immigrants this applied as much in Yiddish as in English. Like others of his contemporaries who also wrote Yiddish socialist poetry, Edelstat’s output was prolific. Moreover, whenever he completed a new poem it would be carried on the front page of one of the Yiddish language newspapers. Edelstat was for some years editor of the anarchist Yiddish language newspaper Fraye Arbeter Shtime (Free Voice of Labour).

Edelstat worked for a shoemaker in Russia and then in garment sweatshops in the US. Many of his poems dealt with the suffering and horrific work conditions faced by Jewish and other immigrant garment workers in an era that preceded any safety legislation.  The contemporary Puerto-Rican – Jewish writer Aurora Levins Morales used ‘Tsu Got Vel Ikh Veynen’ (To God I Cry Out) the first line of a poem she attributes to Edelstat about nineteenth century working conditions in the needle trades as the title of an article describing the oppression and resistance of her Puerto Rican immigrant grandmother in New York’s Melody Bra and Girdle plant in the 1950s. (The authorship of the poem is conversely listed as unknown in the Workers’ Circle song collection; this suggests it may have been a folksong that Edelstat adapted, which was a common practice among Yiddish poets).

Regardless of whether or not Edelstat wrote this particular poem it is clear that his concern with fighting oppression and exploitation was not limited to the struggles of Jewish workers. Ori Kritz shows how Edelstat was directly inspired by workers’ collective resistance notably the 1886 General Strike in Chicago over the campaign for an eight hour working day and the 1887 hangings of workers following the deaths of police during clashes in the Haymarket area. He was also influenced by and wrote poems about the Paris Commune and radical anti-slavery activist John Brown.
…

In Struggle

During a movement-building event in December 2023 the Jewish Bloc for Palestine decided to sing two Yiddish songs together. One of them was Edelstat’s poem In Kamf ‘In Struggle’, written in 1889.

The final verse is aimed at struggling against all kinds of oppressors. It reveals a radical world-making agenda and an anti-imperialist and internationalist politics.

You can murder us, tyrants,
But time will bring new fighters,
And we will fight and fight 
Until the whole world is free

Edelstat was one of the best known radical Yiddish poets writing in the late nineteenth century. Another, Morris Winchevsky, born in 1856, immigrated to the UK from the Pale of Settlement – via a spell in Germany including five months in prison under Bismarck’s first anti-socialist laws. In the three and a half decades leading up to the First World War over 100,000 Jews from Eastern Europe settled in London. Winchevsky did not remain in London for his entire life but migrated on to New York in 1894. In her article ‘Revolution in Anglo-Yiddish poetry’ (and later in a book Whitechapel Noise), historian Vivi Lachs has written extensively on Winchevsky’s work. 

The Future

Unlike Edelstat, Winchevsky was not a manual worker himself, making a living largely through clerical work. Lachs comments that union activism among the Jewish immigrants in London was largely led by Russian-speaking socialists whose main aim was socialist revolution across the Yiddish-speaking world. Winchevsky noted that these socialists’ concerns with political and social revolution did not necessarily match the mass of workers’ concerns with ‘the immediate amelioration of their condition’. Among Winchevsky’s hundreds of poems, he included works that addressed both these perspectives. 

It could be argued that, in the context of the ongoing genocide in historic Palestine in March 2024, it is the more radical and world-making of Winchevsky’s poems that can be effective in building the struggle and informing Jews and others about the strength of the internationalist, revolutionary Yiddish socialist tradition.

Lachs categorises this group of Winchevsky poems as ‘Envisaging revolution and a socialist future’. Highlighting the internationalism of the poems, Lachs’ observes that they were ‘[written] for a world audience.’

In 2022 after a series of union-led academic staff strikes here at the University of Sussex, Yiddish-singing workshops were organised building on the relations that the staff union – the University and College Union – had built with the University of Sussex Students’ Union. The workshops were a collaboration with University of Sussex senior lecturer, poet and translator of Yiddish poetry, Sam Solomon, composer and musician Polina Shepherd and myself. One of the most powerful songs that were learned at the workshops was based on Winchevsky’s poem The Future [Di Tsukunft]. In this piece Winchevksy sounds to my twenty-first century ears, not only internationalist and anti-imperialist, but also abolitionist.

O, the world will grow bolder.
There will be no master,
Nor crown, nor wealth,
Nor the soldier’s sword.
So have courage in the ranks,
In the ranks to liberate,
To liberate and renew
Our old world!

Like Edelstat’s In Struggle, Winchevsky’s The Future became an important anthem for the Bund, a secular socialist movement of Jewish workers that believed in doikayt – hereness – making worlds in diaspora. The Bund was largely opposed to Zionism for most of its history. The Bund was instituted in Vilnius in 1897 (the same year the Zionist Organisation (later the World Zionist Organisation was founded in Basel, Switzerland). The Bund became a major political, social and cultural force in pre-revolutionary Russia and in interwar Poland and Lithuania.

Oh You Foolish Little Zionists (Oy, Ir Narishn Tsionistn)

It was in the interwar period, in Kiev in 1931 – that Soviet ethnomusicologist Moshe Beregovski recorded house painter T. S. Lakhman singing a song that would become an anti-Zionist Yiddish anthem (Oy, ir narishn tsionistn). Decades later the song was translated by Daniel Kahn as ‘Oh You Foolish Little Zionists’.

Oh you foolish little Zionists
With your utopian mentality
You’d better go down to the factory
And learn the worker’s reality

You want to take us to Jerusalem
So we can die as a nation
We’d rather stay in the diaspora
And fight for our liberation

After the holocaust Bundism had a more complex relationship with Zionism as Sai Englert’s 2016 Salvage magazine review of Alain Brossat and Silvie Klingberg’s Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism makes clear. The book includes interviews with anti-zionist Jews who ended up living the latter parts of their lives in Israel. 

However, the radical, internationalist and anti-imperialist content of some of the work of late nineteenth century Russian Jewish socialist poets like Edelstat and Winchevsky reemerged as part of the Yiddish song and Klezmer revival from the early 1980s. Over the last two decades Daniel Kahn has been one of the most innovative contemporary artists working with radical Yiddish poetry. As with Kahn’s tradaptation of ‘Oh you foolish little Zionists’ that I just mentioned, Kahn is known for simultaneous part-translation and adaptation of many of the earlier radical Yiddish poems, for example Edelstat’s Working Women (Arbeter Froyen). 

This Land is Your Land

Kahn has also translated some classic English songs into Yiddish and, in some cases, given them greater political bite. Here in the last verse of his co-translation and co-adaptation (with Linda Gritz, Michael Alpert and Josh Waletsky) of Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land, an explicitly no borders anthem is created which appeals to the need for collectivity across divides ‘nito keyn tsamen, ven nor tsuzamen’ (there are no barriers if we are united). 

On wet streets, in deep shadows, I see people begging for change
To see such poverty, I wonder: if this is a country for me and you.
There’s noone who can stop us or forbid us the paths of freedom.
There are no barriers if we are united. This is a country for me and you.

And the translators’ note on the CD version of the song makes clear the politics that lie behind it. 

‘(Translators’ note: this radical song is often seen as an uncritical patriotic anthem, ignoring a history of stolen land, lives, and labor. We challenge this, and stand in solidarity with Indigenous, Black and immigrant voices calling for power, reparation and justice in this land)’

Another version would be needed to apply the Yiddish radical tradition to historic Palestine today.

Joe Dobkin’s Falling Walls

And this maybe the kind of work that Joe Dobkin can do. Dobkin’s song in progress Falling Walls ‘Falndike Vent’ refers directly to the genocide in Gaza and connects it to the holocaust. Just as the Jewish Bloc for Palestine in the UK is part of the wider Palestinian-led liberation movement, so, in the US, Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now are also part of that same movement. In Falling Walls Dobkin provides a resource that I would argue can galvanise continued action by Jews and others as part of the movement for Palestinian liberation.

He writes:

I get my name from a martyr
This language from a land that is no more [clearly referring to Yiddish]
They tried to erase our existence
But we can’t let that wound be weaponized

And further on in Falling Walls with direct reference to hunger and thirst Dobkin continues:

I stand with everyone who hungers for life and
For everyone to be free from the river to the sea.

The last verse reveals a fully internationalist and anti-imperialist orientation:

We all have a powerful thirst
What quenches it is always equal for everyone.
No one is free until everyone is liberated
Between every sea and river.

(Thanks to Annie Cohen for reading an earlier draft of this text and her very helpful suggestions; remaining errors and all opinions expressed are mine alone.)

Ben Rogaly teaches in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex. He is part of the ‘Hopeful Solidarities in Brighton and Hove’ collective and one of the organisers of the Brighton Reading Room (a collaboration with Pluto Press). His recent publications include an article in The Sociological Review co-authored with Moushumi Bhowmik which explores the role of music (including radical Yiddish songs) in building internationalist politics of solidarity.