Over the past five years, a number of authors have critically examined the complexity of the historical Jewish-Left alliance. They include, most notably, Jack Jacobs (Jews and Leftist Politics [Cambridge University Press, 2017]); Matthew Hoffman and Henry Srebrnik (A Vanished Ideology [State University of New York Press, 2016]); Alain Brossat and Sylvie Klingberg (Revolutionary Yiddishland [Verso, 2016]); Colin Shindler (Israel and the European Left [Continuum, 2012]); and Philip Mendes (Jews and the Left [Palgrave, 2014]).
As a collective, these texts interrogate the key factors that attracted Jews to the political Left, the extent to which they identified as Jews per se, the reasons why the Jewish-Left alliance declined, and whether there is likely to be a revival of the Jewish-Left connection in the future. Although they vary from sole authored texts to edited contributions, their locational focus tends to be at least regional if not...
