This rich and poignant and often enthralling record traces the Yiddishland revolutionaries from their East European roots through the years of hope and struggle and hideous crimes to the heroic anti-Nazi resistance and beyond, with fascinating asides on Spain and Palestine. There are many lessons for today, not least the significance ofthe lively interaction of revolutionary intellectuals and workers and the efforts to integrate the commitment to radical social and economic change with the formation of a Jewish identity that would break sharply from the stultifying tradition and open the way to the aspirations of the Jewish workers' movement that was at the forefront of revolutionary struggle from its earliest days.

- Noam Chomsky,

Could there have been a future for pre-war Jewry in which Israel did not exist and Jews were gathered in a nation state within a federated Soviet Union? This is one of the questions brought up in Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klingberg's book. There is hope for the spirit and aims behind the stories this book tells. Jewish radicalism did not die out in 1942 with the Final Solution. It now expresses itself without Yiddish.

- Clive Bloom, Times Higher Educational Supplement

A fascinating window onto a lost world. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the complex relationship between the Jewish left, the general left, and Zionism. The gripping testimonies collected in these pages give the lie to the idea that Jews in the Shoah went like sheep to the slaughter. Brossat and Klingberg do not try to iron out the wrinkles of the past. Their insightful commentary illuminates the passions, paradoxes, triumphs and defeats of the witnesses who populate their book.

- Brian Klug, author of Being Jewish and Doing Justice,

Nowadays we know more and more about the Nazi Genocide. Unfortunately, we have much less knowledge about the everyday life which preceded the horror and was so brutally terminated. For opening up this world we must praise Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klinberg for their vital new book, <i>Revolutionary Yiddishland.</i> Here, life is given priority over death, and the struggles of so many in the Yiddishland allow us to see past the catastrophes.

- Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People,

Praiseworthy

Jewish Currents

Brossat and Klingberg's book is a memorial to a missing world. As an aesthetic composition, it is beautiful.

- Max Ajl, Mondoweiss

Altogether, <i>Revolutionary Yiddishland</i> is a thoroughly engaging read. It's an important historical document preserving the memory of this radical period of Jewish and European history.

- JP O'Malley, Haaretz