Description
Book SynopsisMany earlier works on the politics of Polish Jewry have suggested that Bundist victories were ephemeral or attributable to outside forces. Jack Jacobs, however, argues convincingly that the electoral success of the Bund was linked to the long-term efforts of the constellation of cultural, educational, and other movements revolving around the party.
Trade Review[Jacobs’s] intellectual integrity, the cogency of his analysis, and the thoroughness of his research make this book an invaluable contribution to our understanding of Jewish life and politics, indeed of life and politics in general, in that tragic historical episode known as interwar Poland. His illuminating analysis of the left-wing laicist networks, into which the Bund was integrated, explains the attractiveness of the Jewish workers’ party for contemporaries and demonstrates once again that the Bund was far more than just a political party. The author skillfully takes the reader deep into the workings of a popular political movement in the first half of the twentieth century in order to demonstrate the Bund's immense popularity during the interwar era. In this lucid, expertly researched and rewarding monograph, Jack Jacobs discovers previously unsuspected dynamism and positive developments in interwar Polish Jewry, the world's largest Jewish community. In the past few years the Polish Bund has begun to receive much more scholarly attention and Jack Jacobs’s
Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland is a welcome and important addition.
