A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York

by Tony Michels

In a compelling history of the Jewish community in New York during four decades of mass immigration, Tony Michels examines the defining role of the Yiddish socialist movement in the American Jewish experience. The movement, founded in the 1880s, was dominated by Russian-speaking intellectuals, including Abraham Cahan, Mikhail Zametkin, and Chaim Zhitlovsky. Socialist leaders quickly found Yiddish essential to convey their message to the Jewish immigrant community, and they developed a remarkable public culture through lectures and social events, workers' education societies, Yiddish schools, and a press that found its strongest voice in the mass-circulation newspaper Forverts. Arguing against the view that socialism and Yiddish culture arrived as Old World holdovers, Michels demonstrates that they arose in New York in response to local conditions and thrived not despite Americanization, but because of it. And the influence of the movement swirled far beyond the Lower East Side, to a transnational culture in which individuals, ideas, and institutions crossed the Atlantic. New York Jews, in the beginning, exported Yiddish socialism to Russia, not the other way around. The Yiddish socialist movement shaped Jewish communities across the United States well into the twentieth century and left an important political legacy that extends to the rise of neoconservatism. A story of hopeful successes and bitter disappointments, A Fire in Their Hearts brings to vivid life this formative period for American Jews and the American left.

Genres: Jewish, History, Nonfiction, Judaism, New York

352 pages, Hardcover

First published November 30, 2005

Reviews

[Elliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shoutout the Jews

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was excited to read this but found myself less interested in all of the small details about newspapers and specific people and wanting more of a dive into the political landscape of the time period and how the Jewish socialist movement and Jewish labor movement fit into it. Thought some of the points about nationalism and the question of assimilation vs cultural preservation were very interesting. And to think about the role of the Yiddish language in that, which my grandparents spoke but was lost in just 2 generations. The ending also had a pretty strong anti-communist tint which I found off-putting.

[Eleanor C Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

For race, ethnicity, and politics in nyc

[Andrew Basta · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is absolutely jam-packed with knowledge in every paragraph. It's one of those books where every paragraph could lead you down a tangent investigating a particular place, person, publication, group... It served a great purpose for me in connecting previously disparate threads of history of the American and Jewish left, connecting the arc between the haymarket affairs through the Socialist Labor Party to the Great Upheavals and various labor struggles to the Communist Party. I dock the book a star just because in some vein it doesn't really grip the reader for much of the book (perhaps excluding the Russian Revolution). The characters and struggles Michels is describing take over people's lives and include the long journeys of self-transformation and it can be tough to grasp the intensity of this project through parts of the book.

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very valuable as a reference book, but not that engaging. Maybe it was meant that way -- but the title makes you feel like you are going to get a little closer to the passions of those Yiddish Socialists!

[Neal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Origins of American Jewish liberalism.