The war in Gaza has brought the “Israel Question” to the forefront of political debates, and in particular debates regarding the nature and origins of the Israeli state and its relationship to the Jewish people and antisemitism. At the heart of the case for Israel is the idea that it provides a safe haven for Jews, against the antisemitism that is a timeless threat; a threat that Jews have supposedly failed to confront, resulting in what has been called “lachrymose conception of Jewish history”: that story of a people who remained passive in the face of their oppression, finally going like lambs to the slaughter to the Nazi gas chambers. Against this, the Radical Jewish Tradition sets out to present a very different history, rescuing from obscurity the “revolutionaries, resistance fighters and firebrands” who fought back, often with considerable success.

The book is the work of two Marxists — Donny Gluckstein in the UK and Janey Stone in Australia. Both have long experience of research, writing and activism and these multiple dimensions to their work both shape and enrich the narrative. They also explain the focus on grass-roots activism; an expression of the Marxist understanding that people make their own history. Intellectuals get the occasional look-in, but in this telling it is through struggle and solidarity that working class people develop the tools they need to fight with. This truth is often obscured in those histories which separate out Jewish struggles and class struggles in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The nine central chapters explore the period from the 1880s to 1945: Russia under the Tsars and under Stalin; London’s East End; New York in the Roaring Twenties; Poland and Germany in the darkening 1930s. And everywhere, the authors find resistance to class exploitation and antisemitism. These are very different times and places, and the authors draw on research that goes deep as well as wide: the bibliography runs to twenty-four small-print pages.

The book begins with an outline of the various political traditions that Jewish activists inherited and developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alongside and within the broad and well-known currents of liberalism, social democracy, anarchism and communism, Jews responded in a variety of ways — embracing conservative religious orthodoxy, assimilation, nationalism, political and cultural Zionism. Radicals challenged these currents with Ideas of their own: socialist Zionism, Marxism, syndicalism, labour Bundism. Forms of struggle, goals and tactics, allies and enemies, nationalism, separatism and assimilation were all sites of contention.

The Marxism of the authors matters because it brings their attention to the dual experiences of Jews in their societies, where they experienced both class exploitation and racist antisemitism. Conflicts in the workplace and the community during times of extraordinary social, political and cultural transformation gave the Jewish struggles a particular colouration. Class struggles brought Jewish and other workers together, overcoming in practice the supposedly deeply-embedded racism of the working class. There were specifically Jewish trade unions, there were unions in which Jewish workers participated and there were unions where Jews served alongside others in leadership roles.

Socially and culturally, antisemitism affected the lives of Jews in all social classes, but until 1933 their experiences differed greatly. Being refused membership of gentlemen’s clubs or subject to quotas for admission to universities are very different to being subjected to the pogroms and riots and workplace discrimination unleashed on working class and peasant communities. Which is not to say that intellectuals weren’t targeted too. but class differences led to different strategies for fighting antisemitism in different social groups. Strikes and unionisation were rarely if ever welcomed by Jewish factory and sweatshop owners and managers. Even with the rise of German fascism thousands were able to flee the country, while millions were left to die.

But while class is, of course, at the centre of the book’s narrative, the authors do not overlook the role of racism. Nor do they separate these elements out unnecessarily. Class struggle and the challenge to antisemitism are not the same thing, but in the case of Jewish workers they came together; it is in struggle that they intertwine. Even when not campaigning specifically around Jewish issues, the role of Jewish unionists and community leaders did not go unnoticed. Acts of common struggle generated acts of solidarity. The most famous of these was perhaps the decision of the dockworkers to throw themselves in the defence of East End Jewish communities in 1936, drawing on memories of Jewish families taking in dockers’ children to stop them starving during the great strike of 1912.

Jews were embedded in communities of their own with ties of family, religion and neighbourliness. These communities offered opportunities for different kinds of struggles including rent-strikes, food riots, street battles against pogroms. This explains one of the great strengths of the book: how it allows women to take their place at the forefront of the story — in so many of the struggles, both in the factories and workshops, and in the streetsmunities to support themselves, their families and their neighbours. Women were often the fiercest enemies of the cops and thugs and scabs and fascists, taking up sticks and rocks and hurling whatever was to hand from their windows. One enterprising woman thumped her boss with her umbrella, knocking him down. Another slapped a police officer with a hefty piece of fresh liver.

Ideas and calls for strikes and demonstrations were circulated not just in newspapers and flyers, but in the tight but extensive networks of what one observer described as the “talkiest” of cities. (He was referring to New York, but the way in which the poor spent so much time outside their cramped and often miserable homes makes this relevant to urban life more generally.) Women were essential conduits for this.

The book opens with a discussion of the roots of antisemitism, presenting the standard Marxist account — which locates its origins not in human nature or even in social conditions, but in a conscious manipulation by the ruling class, as a strategy to divide workers and weaken their ability to fight for their emancipation. In relation to the time period covered by the book, it is easy to see how this works. Antisemitism of the most blatant and virulent form was openly and shamelessly promulgated by governments, the press, churches, professionals and experts. Even many of the more enlightened socialists were not untainted by it.

The limitations of this top-down explanation don’t matter much to this book, given the period that it covers, but the problem becomes more acute when the book turns its attention to the present, as it does in a brief conclusion. Since the Second World War, antisemitism has been virtually unutterable in the West, where the shadow of the Holocaust casts its pall. While the authors suggest that antisemitism retains its place on the dishonour role of early twenty-first century oppressions (“racism, antisemitism, islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia and so on”), it would be almost impossible to find evidence of antisemitism being promoted by those in power in the advanced capitalist countries. (So, too, some, but not all, of the other oppressions.) It might be argued that in the absence of a powerful working class discontent, such promotion of division is not required. In the West, the working class today is characterised not by an insurgency that needs to be deflected by a divide-and-conquer strategy. If anything, the strategy of the powerful is to promote what they like to refer to as “social cohesion”. There is much work to be done here to sort through this.

The relevance of the Radical Jewish Tradition today — and it is an urgent one — is not that it offers a guide to campaigning against antisemitism (though revealing this history is its great achievement); rather, it is that it reminds us of the value of working-class struggle. This is a book that honours those who struggled for a better world, the famous and the unknown, in battles great and small daily struggles. It is a book for our time.