The book starts in the 1930s, the heyday of the American Jewish left, with the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party [SWP], and a huge Jewish labor movement, particularly in New York City with the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union [ILGWU], constituting hundreds of thousands of American Jewish members.

The Jewish left long precedes the 1930s. In fact, historian Tony Michels points out that the Jewish left really begins in the late-nineteenth century and actually precedes the European Jewish left.

While there was never a huge presence of the Jewish Labour Bund in the US, the Jewish wing of the Communist Party was actually very Bundish in their celebration of Jewish identity. There was a kind of Bundishkeit to the American Jewish left that adopted many of the cultural hallmarks of the Bund — diasporism, cultural pride, internationalism, Yiddishkeit — even if they did not adopt the Bund’s call for Jewish autonomy. This could be seen in the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order [JPFO], which was a breakaway from the Workmen’s Circle, magazines such as Jewish Life and Morgen Freiheit, as well as with artists such as Ben Shahn, Victor Arnautoff, Hugo Gellert, and writers such as Mike Gold and Muriel Rukeyser.

So what was Jewish culture in the 1930s and 1940s? It was often pro–Yiddish language and grounded in what they called “Jewish progressive values.”

The anti-Zionism of the Jewish left in the 1930s was a little different than today. In some ways, they were probably more critical of the idea of a Jewish state. But their anti-Zionism emerged organically out of their diasporic, Jewish, Yiddish, secular humanism. They didn’t become anti-Zionist and then leftist — they were leftists, humanists, internationalists. So, when the Zionist movement started gaining steam in the 1940s, they saw it as the antithesis of everything progressive Jewish culture was supposed to be.

Their analysis saw Zionism as a form of fascism, the opposite of their progressive internationalism, and was aligned with imperialism. There were numerous essays published in the 1930s making this case. William Zukerman, a well-known socialist Jewish journalist who later founded a newsletter in the 1950s, famously referred to Zionism as “machine-gun Judaism.” He openly called the Zionists “fascists.” Robert Gessner famously called [Ze’ev] Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism “a little Fuhrer on the Red Sea.”Mike Gold — probably the most prominent Jewish Communist of the 1930s and ’40s — essentially depicts his novel’s Zionist villain, Baruch Goldfarb, as a sleazy New York right-wing politician, a labor spy, and a vote-breaker.

For them, it was clear: the Zionists were the Roy Cohns of the world.

The first counterintuitive fact one has to understand is that American Jewish left was kind of an autochthonous development; it was not an import from foreign shores. Indeed, I might turn the question around a little and ask: Why did a Jewish left emerge in the United States? It may seem unlikely, given that the US isn’t typically known for its progressivism.

Yet it’s also important to remember that May Day begins in the United States. Karl Marx, for instance, wrote very movingly about the American labor movement; the 1870s and 1880s in the US saw some of the most radical strikes and organizing anywhere in the world. The Haymarket martyrs and the eight-hour-day movement were hugely influential on the global left.

This is also a moment in which we see a huge influx of mostly working-class Jews fleeing the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe and arriving amid this maelstrom of labor union activity. These Jews were aware of the connection between Jewish emancipation and European democratic revolutions — they arrive in the United States and encounter German, Mexican, and other immigrant labor activists. These Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants came to America and joined the ranks of the proletariat and encountered German and other immigrant socialists. Many of them became socialists not in Europe, but once they arrived in the US.

The interesting question isn’t, “Why did Jews join the left?” Lots of ethnic groups in Europe had an outsize left presence for a time. Germans in the nineteenth century and, in the early twentieth century, Finns made up a huge portion of the Communist Party. The question is instead how and why the Jewish left in America took shape the way it did.

The Jews were actually very similar to other ethnic groups who either brought radicalism with them or became radicalized once they joined the American labor movement. But why did the radicalism persist?

For the Finns and the Germans, it basically lasted a generation, maybe two. But for Jews, it stuck around. If anything, until the 1950s, Jews who were members of the socialist movement became more radical the longer they stayed in America.

The narrative you’ll hear from many Jewish historians is this canard that radicals came from Europe, but as soon as they assimilated, they became proper liberal Democrats. That’s not actually what happened. Instead, these millions of Jewish immigrants became socialists on arrival. The longer they stayed, the more confidence they had in expressing their radical politics.

Mike Gold was a second-generation immigrant. Most of the Communist Party, as historian Michael Denning makes clear in The Cultural Front, was made up of second- and third-generation ethnic Americans — and a huge part of that was Jewish. The Jewish left made up a major portion of white ethnics in the Popular Front.

One reason Jews stayed in the Left longer is that, unlike the European left, the American left had to learn the language of anti-racism. America isn’t just a diverse society — it’s a country built on slavery and indigenous genocide. African Americans were a huge part of the labor movement, particularly in northern cities. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, labor organizers realized that bosses used racism to divide the labor movement. The more progressive and forward-looking factions of the labor movement — like the Wobblies, some wings of the Socialist Party, and the Communist Party — understood that they not only had to be anti-racist, they had to actively embrace the black working class. That was the only way to build a left-wing movement worth anything.

For American Jews, this was the first time that being part of an ethnic, minority left wasn’t at odds with left-wing politics. In Europe, as Enzo Traverso discusses in The Marxists and the Jewish Question, the European left often struggled with what to do with autonomous Jewish movements. The Bund, for example, frequently clashed with other leftist organizations. But in the US, the Left became the first political space where you truly had a multiethnic, left-wing movement in which Jewish ethnic politics wasn’t anti-leftist; it was an integral part of left-wing American culture. As Stuart Hall observed of another settler country, “race was the modality through which class was lived,” and for generations of Jews who still remembered the experience of second-class citizenship in Europe, this was a modality that spoke to their common sense.

Another important factor was that many Jewish leftists identified with African Americans as a way to confront and process their own experiences with antisemitism. Jews who came to America could see the connection immediately, particularly the Eastern European immigrant Jews who joined nascent socialist and Communist movements. When Jewish immigrants in the US saw African Americans being lynched, burned alive, and subjected to all kinds of bodily violations, many immediately recognized it. Many American Jews turned away from cross-racial solidarity; but many who joined the Left understood cross-racial solidarity as being not only the core principle of socialism in the US, but also diasporic Jewish identity.

One could say this was a left-wing form of assimilation. They tried to translate their Jewish experience into what they saw as an American idiom. And within the labor left, that American idiom was anti-racism — just as other Jews, seeking to assimilate into mainstream American whiteness, interpreted the American idiom as racism.

For better or worse, Jews have long had the experience of seeing themselves as a community — a diasporic community — wherever they go. There’s a shared expectation that wherever Jews settle, they gather together, organize, and maintain communal life. That sense of collective identity and community-building didn’t go away in the US. Left-wing Jews did the same thing. There were holidays, rituals, community events, and a sense that wherever you go, you get together as Jews. That wasn’t necessarily the case for other white ethnic diaspora groups.

The Red Scare is an incredibly unappreciated fact of American Jewish life. One can’t underestimate the antisemitism of the Red Scare and the breaking up of the old Jewish left.

Two-thirds of those brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee [HUAC] in 1952 were Jewish — at a time when Jews made up less than 2 percent of the American population. John E. Rankin, Senate leader of HUAC, made a game to “unmask” the Jewish names of people under investigation, acting as though this “revealed” them as communists.

The JPFO, the largest Jewish left organization, was rendered illegal by the government. The Civil Rights Congress, the largest civil rights organization associated with the Communist Party and that had half black and half Jewish leadership, was similarly banned. So when you talk about the assimilation of the Jewish left into liberalism, you also have to talk about the fact that the American Jewish left was effectively crushed. The Communist Party itself, in its heyday, had about 100,000 members, about half of whom were Jewish. What formed the militant backbone of the progressive labor movement and the Congress of Industrial Organizations [CIO] — the dozen militant unions aligned with the Communist Party — were all taken down.

So the shift of Jews toward American liberalism was, in part, a result of the violent suppression of the Jewish left.

The New Left learned this lesson. In the book, I tell a number of stories about Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] activists who were red-diaper babies and learned from family members that if there was going to be a serious left-wing movement in America, it had to be anti-anti-communist. That, I would argue, was one of SDS’s real innovations.

My sense is the Bund itself, as an organization, had very little presence. There were Bundists and there was a circuit where Bundists would come to the United States and go back to Eastern Europe, bringing the good word back and forth. The Bund even opened a New York City office in 1946. So there was some Bund presence, but it was never the main show.

Part of why it didn’t dominate the Jewish left was that there was already a socialist movement in the United States, and then a Communist movement that was already kind of Bundist. Jewish cultural nationalism was in the air in all kinds of ways, not just directly from the Bund. In this anti-colonial era, there were a lot of left-wing versions of national autonomy being articulated. You had anti-colonial nationalism, Irish nationalism, and then in the 1920s, the Soviet Union articulated this idea of being a “mosaic of nations.”

The official Soviet ideology was that they weren’t simply an undifferentiated proletariat or peasantry but a mosaic of national cultures — what the scholar Steven S. Lee refers to as the “ethnic avant-garde” of socialist internationalism, at least before the rise of [Joseph] Stalin. You could have your Yiddish-language newspaper, your section of the Communist Party that met on its own and also joined larger meetings with everyone else, and still be part of a broader, multiethnic, multicultural milieu of the US.

American multiculturalism, in other words. As historian Paul Mishler once argued, multiculturalism emerges out of the multiethnic left of the 1920s and 1930s. The notion of America as a mosaic — a nation made up of many nations — was a popular left-wing idea at the time. It was a rebuttal to both the “melting pot” thesis of American liberalism, as well as to the Socialist Party’s class essentialism.

So American Jewish Bundishness has strong roots in American multiculturalism, of which the Jewish left was a huge part. When a kind of Jewish identitarian politics reemerges in the New Left, in the 1970s, it did so in a context where the New Left was once again exploring revolutionary nationalism. A lot of those revolutionary nationalists looked back to the 1930s and 1940s Communist Party and saw it as a direct antecedent.

They looked at things like the “We Charge Genocide” petition, which came out of the Civil Rights Congress. They looked back to figures like Claudia Jones, a Caribbean Marxist, or C. L. R. James — black, Caribbean, Marxist intellectuals in the United States. This notion of revolutionary nationalism rearticulates itself, and Jewish leftists responded in different directions.

Some said, “We’re revolutionaries; we don’t want anything to do with Jewish politics.” But there were others who went the other way, saying, “Yes, we want to be part of this new revolutionary nationalism of the 1970s, and to contribute as Jews.” One could say the emergence of groups like JVP and JFREJ emerged out of the left wing of identity politics in the 1970s.

Such left-wing identity politics was also a way to answer the rise of what people saw as compulsory Zionism. You didn’t have to be a Zionist to be a left-wing Jewish radical, and yet still articulate a Jewish identity or a Jewish sense of communal belonging. The neo-Bundism of the 1970s — with Chutzpah magazine, the Brooklyn Bridge Collective, and the Jewish radical community J — came out of this milieu. Figures like JFREJ founder Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz were very much part of that tradition.

There’s a point of tension on the Jewish left about the centrality of anti-Zionism. There was an article by a comrade of mine, Jon Danforth-Appell, in Jewish Currents that addresses this debate. I think it’s a frustration among some Jews on the Left that the Jewish left is so focused on Zionism, at the expense of constructing progressive Jewish organizations that serve and speak to their own communities. It also makes it seem as though Zionism is a Jewish problem in the United States, when it’s actually as much an American imperialism problem.

That said, there’s no way out but through. The Jewish world has been subsumed by Zionism. Every major Jewish institution in America today is aggressively Zionist. You can’t have a Jewish organization that doesn’t address the fact that the entire institutional apparatus of the American “liberal” Jewish world is supporting Israel in a time of genocide, when the Israeli government has been captured by apocalyptic fascists.

The Jewish left must address Zionism and organize in solidarity with Palestinians. The other piece is this weaponization and mobilization of Jewish identity, not only to silence pro-Palestine organizing but also as an expression of white supremacy. To be a Jewish leftist is to have your identity mobilized, whether you like it or not.

But I also think the task of the Jewish left is to imagine there’s going to be a world after this crisis, and that you’re going to need organizations and communities that last beyond whatever immediate moment of burning intensity we’re living and dying through.

For better or worse, Jews are an organized community. We have thousands of years of organizing ourselves as a diasporic people, and that’s a resource and a way of thinking about how to continue long after whatever immediate crisis we’re in passes. To the extent that Jews are going to have institutional organizations in the US — and it seems we’re going to — then we’re going to have to organize counterinstitutions.

JVP is often maligned as both opportunistically Jewish and then, also, solipsistically Jewish. It’s neither. It’s a real community. JVP Chicago formed over a decade ago out of earlier organizations, and if you go to a meeting today, you will meet a lot of the same people.

JVP obviously has some differences from the Jewish left of the past. It is often derided as too secular, but JVP has many very religious members. People observe holidays, they pray at meetings. It has a Rabbinic Council. There were no rabbis in the Jewish section of the Communist Party. JVP articulates the same internationalist vision for the Jewish community that the Communist Party or other Jewish leftist organizations did in the past and builds out that sense of community.