Reading the Revolution: Jewish Responses to the Upheavals of 1917

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

This panel will consider watershed events of the year 1917 as they affected the lives of Jews in Eastern Europe and America in a variety of instances. As is well known, World War I, the February and October Revolutions in Russia, and the Balfour Declaration all wrought significant changes in Jewish life on multiple continents in a variety of ways. By looking at four distinct issues relating to the events of 1917, this panel will reveal the variety and complexity of the ways in which Yiddish-speakers responded to them.

Focusing on New York as a locus for Jewish responses to revolutionary architect, Leon Trotsky, Tony Michels’ presentation will consider the specifically Jewish response as proferred by memoirists, the Yiddish press and other sources that focus on Trotsky’s peregrinations on the Lower East Side of New York at the beginning of 1917. Edward Portnoy will continue the theme of New York Yiddish attitudes toward the events of 1917 by exploring the responses of the Yiddish press to issues of war, revolution, the refugee crisis, and the publication of the Balfour Declaration. Using memoirs, newspapers, and the Bund’s internal records in Yiddish, Russian, French, and German, Joshua Meyers will examine how the Bund navigated its relationship to political power following the fall of the Romanov regime in 1917 and the resultant political tensions that resulted in the eradication of the Bund in the wake of the Boleshevik Revolution. Remaining within the culture of Yiddish, but providing a literary perspective, Harriet Murav will provide a reassessment of Dovid Bergelson’s 1929 novel, Mides-hadin, a work which prevailing scholarship views as affirming the values of the revolution. Her close reading of the text reveals that the novel does not clearly do so, a fact that ultimately results in a clouded perspective on the results of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish History in Europe, Asia, Israel, and Other Communities

Chair

• Jonathan Brent, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

Individual Presentations

• ‘The East Side Jew That Conquered Europe’: Leon Trotsky in New York City - Tony E. Michels, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Dancing at Two Weddings: The Russian Bund between Nationalism and Socialism in 1917 - Joshua Meyers, Stanford University

• A Strange New World: David Bergelson and 1917 - Harriet Murav, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Yiddish Press Reactions to the Revolutions of 1917 - Edward Portnoy, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

Respondent

• Steven J. Zipperstein, Stanford University