Jewish Leftists and the Challenge of Palestine, 1929

• In Event: Thinking and Writing Across the Jewish-Arab Divide

Abstract

In August of 1929, a wave of violence across Palestine led to the deaths of over two hundred Jews, as well as Arabs, and the injuries of hundreds more. The overwhelming poetic response to the 1929 riots in Palestine, either in support of the Jews or Arabs, demonstrates the symbolic importance of these events to the formation of Jewish cultural and political identity, particularly on the left. In this paper, I will examine how the 1929 violence in Palestine changed the landscape of Yiddish poetry. Of particular interest to me are the poets in both the US and Soviet Union, including Moyshe Teyf, Moyshe Nadir, Aaron Kurtz, and Shifre Vays, who published on the pages of the New York Communist Yiddish daily Frayhayt, and the writers, including H. Leyvik and Menakhem Boreysho, who left the Frayhayt after August 1929 to form the journal Vokh. Central to these poetic debates was whether to use the terms “pogrom” or “uprising” to characterize the violence. After Hebron, Jews had to choose whether they were willing to stand with Jewish victims regardless of their political and religious beliefs, or whether they were, alternatively, willing to give up their identification with victimized Jews, identifying instead with the Arab workers and peasants as the Communist International demanded. Returning to the poetic debates of 1929 ninety years later gives us the opportunity to assess, in a historical light, the relationship between nationhood and internationalism in the Jewish community.

Author

• Amelia Mukamel Glaser, UCSD