Jews played highly visible roles, over an extended period of time, in the leadership of leftist movements, and, in the first half of the twentieth century, were also evident in the rank-and-file of specific left-wing political parties. At the present point in time, however, left-wing ideas no longer hold the same degree of attraction for Jews as they did seventy five years ago. The intent of this talk will be both to explore why there were so many Jews sympathetic to left-wing causes in the past, and the reasons underlying changes in Jewish political opinion. The relationship of Jews to the left, Jacobs argues, was historically contingent, and cannot be explained, as others would have it, either by the purported characteristics of Jews or by the impact of Jewish religious ideas.

Jack Jacobs is a professor of political science at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of On Socialists and “the Jewish Question” after Marx (1992), Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland (2009), and The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism (2015), and is the editor of Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100 (2001), and, most recently, of Jews and the Political Left, which will be published by Cambridge University Press. Professor Jacobs was a Fulbright Scholar at Tel Aviv University in 1996-1997, and served as a Fulbright Scholar at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute in 2009.

Image courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

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