Founded in the Russian Empire in 1897, the Jewish Labor Bund became one of the most influential Jewish political movements in Eastern Europe. The Bund was secular, socialist, and rooted in the principle of doikayt, or “hereness”: the belief that Jews should fight for dignity and equality in the countries where they lived. It played a major role in Jewish political and cultural life before the Second World War. Most of its members were murdered in the Holocaust, and the movement itself was largely erased from popular memory.

What, if anything, does the Bund’s legacy offer American Jewish life today? In this four-session reading group, we’ll explore that question through Molly Crabapple’s new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, together with supplementary materials. We’ll consider the Bund’s history, its vision of solidarity and Jewish life in the diaspora, and why its ideas still provoke argument.

Who this is for:

• Readers interested in modern Jewish history and politics
• Anyone curious about Jewish socialism and secular Jewish culture
• Readers who enjoy discussing a new book in a group

What you'll leave with

• A grounding in the Bund’s history and its idea of doikayt
• A discussion of what, if anything, the Bund offers American Jewish life today

Four Fridays: November 6, 13, 20, December 4, 12–1pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.

Twenty years ago, historian Cheryl Lynn Greenberg published Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century, a landmark study of the complicated political relationship between Black and Jewish Americans. Challenging both the nostalgic idea of a seamless Black-Jewish alliance and the notion that the relationship simply collapsed, Greenberg traced a history in which cooperation and conflict, shared political goals and competing interests, were intertwined from the beginning.

Two decades later, Greenberg returns to Troubling the Waters to ask what has changed, what has endured, and how the history looks from the vantage point of today. What can the past tell us about Black-Jewish relations now, and does the idea of a Black-Jewish alliance still help us understand the political relationship between the two communities?

Who this is for

• Anyone interested in the history of Black-Jewish relations in America, beyond the simplified alliance-or-collapse narrative
• Readers of Troubling the Waters looking to hear from the author directly, twenty years on
• Those thinking about coalition politics and how shared and competing interests shape relationships between communities over time

What you'll leave with

• Greenberg’s account of how cooperation and conflict between Black and Jewish Americans were intertwined from the start
• Her view of what has changed in twenty years, and whether the idea of an alliance still helps explain the present

Two Wednesdays: November 11 & 18, 6–7:30pm Pacific

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.

Why did so many Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries become revolutionaries? Ask the question in New York or Warsaw and you get one set of answers. In Baghdad, Casablanca, or Tehran, the story changes. Radical Jewish Politics: A Global Perspective, a new volume from Rutgers University Press, starts in the Middle East and North Africa, with Jewish communists in Iraq and Egypt and anticolonial fighters in Algeria and Tunisia, and zooms out to Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, and the Soviet Union. What emerges is a history of Jews who wanted to remake the world and, just as much, to find a place in it. Communism, anarchism, and anticolonial nationalism all promised that place, and all of them, sooner or later, exacted a price: prison, exile, or Jewishness itself. Editors Nathaniel Deutsch and Alma Heckman of UC Santa Cruz and Tony Michels of the University of Wisconsin–Madison join us to talk about what this new global view reveals.

Who this is for:

• Anyone interested in modern Jewish history beyond Europe and the United States
• Readers curious about Jewish communists, anarchists, and anticolonial activists

What you'll leave with:

• A look at Jewish radicals in Iraq, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Argentina, and Brazil and how local conditions shaped their choices
• The chance to put your questions to the volume’s three editors

Monday, December 7, 6–7:30pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.