Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism

Description

This book takes a timely look at histories of radical Jewish movements, their modes of Holocaust memorialisation, and their relationships with broader anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles. Its primary focus is Australia, where Jewish antifascism was a major political and cultural force in Jewish communities in the 1940s and early 1950s. This cultural and intellectual history of Jewish antifascism utilises a transnational lens to provide an exploration of a Jewish antifascist ideology that took hold in the middle of the twentieth century across Jewish communities worldwide. It argues that Jewish antifascism offered an alternate path for Jewish politics that was foreclosed by mutually reinforcing ideologies of settler colonialism, both in Palestine and Australia. Acknowledgements Contents Chapter 1: Introduction Jewish Communism or Jewish Antifascism? Challenging the Australian Jewish Story Multiculturalism from the Bottom-Up Jews, Race, and Settler Colonialism Chapter 2: Remembering the Holocaust, Fighting Fascism Memorialising the Holocaust ‘Six million of the “big noses” died in concentration camps’: Internalised Antisemitism, the Warsaw Ghetto, and a Political Ethic of Memory Reviewing, Translating, and Publishing Holocaust Literature ‘Commemorating the Jewish “Anzac Day”’: The Warsaw Ghetto and Multidirectional Memory ‘[R]espectful, uniformed guests [who] were regaled with motion pictures of Warsaw in flames’: Genocide, the Holocaust and Decolonisation ‘Learn[ing] what it cost German Jewry so dearly to teach’: Lessons for Australia Chapter 3: Jewish Antifascism, Communism, and Antisemitism The ‘spectre of Goebbels’ and the Necessity of Antifascism ‘I am a Jew’: Jewish Antifascism and the Popular Front An Internationalist Progressive Antifascist Jewish Politics ‘The tall Russian … brought their ghosts into the hall’: The Meaning of Communism for Unity ‘Who are the big donors behind the agitator?’: Critical Theory, Antifascism, and Antisemitism ‘Less Jewish Jews’: Assimilation, Antisemitism, and Jewish Political Subjectivity Chapter 4: The Jewish Left, Zionism, and the Diaspora ‘A world of free peoples living in peace’: Yishuvism Not Zionism ‘Does the state of Israel solve the Jewish question?’: After'48 ‘For God, for King and for Country’: Responses to Assimilationism ‘Nationalist and petty bourgeois in ideology and leadership’: The Antifascist Jewish Left and the Bund Jewish Culture, Diasporism, and Multilingualism Chapter 5: The Anti-German Migration Campaign and the Fall of the Jewish Antifascist Left ‘A real contribution to the spread of justice and good will in the world’: The Political Context of the Anti-German Migration Campaign Transnational Discourses: Debating the De-Nazification of Germany The Students of Cologne University and the Failed De-Nazification of West Germany The Jewish Left, the Communist Party, and the Anti-German Migration Campaign ‘People who not only experienced Fascism themselves, but attempted to practice it’: The Anti-German Migration Campaign, Holocaust Survivors, and the Bund ‘People whose emotions are stronger than their loyalty to Australia’: Jews as Political Subjects in the Anti-German Migration Campaign ‘Finkanasy’s ragtime bund’ and the New Strategy ‘Israel had no alternative but to deal directly with Germany on this issue’: Israel, Zionism, and West Germany ‘It was a most disappointing protest’: The End of the Anti-German Migration Campaign Chapter 6: Jewish Antifascism, Australian Cultural Nationalism, and Settler Colonialism ‘What good was it to the black man to be an Australian?’: Three Modes of Engagement with Settler Colonialism Goldhar’s ‘Australian Literature’ and Settler Subjectivity ‘Art will be required to exercise its varied and subtle means’: Southern Stories Communist Culture, Australianism, and Decolonisation Chapter 7: Defining a Jewish Antifascist Minor Literature Multiple Languages, Multiple Audiences Left Internationalism Yosl Bergner, Aboriginal Resistance, and Australian Jewish Antifascism A Jewish Antifascist Minor Culture Judah Waten’s ‘The Loser is Black’ ‘One fine happy band of mates’: Judah Waten’s The Unbending Chapter 8: Conclusion Bibliography Primary Sources Archives Archive of Australian Judaica, University of Sydney Australian Jewish Historical Society, Sydney British Library Hanger Collection of Australian Playscripts, Fryer Library, University of Queensland Lippmann Collection (Private) Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW National Archives of Australia National Library of Australia Online Access State Library of Victoria Trove Database University of Melbourne Archives University of Melbourne, Baillieu Library References Pamphlets Published Literary Works and Plays of the Period Memoirs Miscellaneous Secondary Sources Index