The fascinating, never-before-told story of the relationship between American Jews and the Soviet Union over half a century
For decades, the Russian Revolution and its aftermath captured the global imagination, eliciting a range of reactions and thrusting American Jews into the center of vigorous political activity and debate. Thousands of Jews who immigrated to the United States in the early twentieth century had belonged to revolutionary parties in Russia and participated in the uprisings of 1905 and 1917. With their left-wing commitments, trans-Atlantic ties, and the sense that their people’s fate was bound up with Russia's, Jews in the United States quickly assumed a new level of visibility and importance on the political left as the revolution unfolded.
In Tomorrow Is the Question, Tony Michels demonstrates how the Russian Revolution and the regime it produced shaped the politics of American Jews. The book uncovers various campaigns to send material aid to underground revolutionaries, Soviet political prisoners, and the Red Army in its war against Nazism; and explores debates over Communism, Jewish nationalism, and the future of socialism as a democratic ideal. The myriad engagements of Jews with the Russian Revolution, Michels’ book shows, forged the American left as we know it today.