Collette Christine - Jews, Labour and the Left, 1918-48

Stephen Bird MSc ALA took Honours in History at the University of North London and his MSc at Birbeck College London in Politics and Administration. He was appointed Labour Party archivist in 1978. Since 1990 he has been archivist/librarian at the National Museum of Labour History in Manchester. He is a member of the Society for the Study of Labour History Executive Committee, the Co-ordinating Committee of the International Association of Labour History Institutions and is the Secretary of the United Kingdom Political Parties Archives Network. Established Labour Heritage, the Labour Party's history society in 1981.

Christine Collette (Oxon), MLitt (Oxon) is Reader in Class and Gender Studies at Edge Hill College of Higher Education. She is a member of the Society for the Study of Labour History Executive Committee and was a Founder member of Labour Heritage, the Labour Party's History Society. She is a member of the Labor and Working Class History Association (USA). Her publications in the fields of Labour and Women's History and feminist pedagogy include The International Faith, the first book in Ashgate's Studies in Labour History series.

David De Vries is a lecturer at the Department of Labour Studies, Tel Aviv University. He is the author of Idealism and Bureaucracy in 1920s Palestine. The Origins of 'Red Haifa' (Tel Aviv, 1999). His research interests focus on the social history of Palestine and in several articles he examined the interrelations of labour and nationalism. At present he is working on strikes and national identity in Palestine during the first half of the twentieth century.

Jason Heppell is a tutor in the Department of History, University of Sheffield, He is preparing a doctoral thesis on Jews in the Communist Party of Great Britain. In 1996-1997 he attended the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford. He has presented papers at conferences in Britain and the USA.

Paul Kelemen teaches in the Department of Sociology, University of Manchester. He has published articles related to Zionism and the British Labour Movement in Social History, International Review of Social History, Labour History Review and Economy and Society.

Arieh Lebowitz is Director of Public Information as well as Program Associate at the Jewish Labor Committee. An activist for many years in Americans for Progressive Israel, a Socialist Zionist organisation, he is currently a Vice President of Meretz USA, API's successor body. He holds a degree in Judaic Studies from Binghamton University. Together with Gail Malmgreen, he edited a volume on the Holocaust-era papers of the Jewish Labor Committee Collection at the Robert F. Wagner Labour Archives.

Gail Malmgreen is the archivist for the Jewish Labor Committee Collection at the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, New York University. She holds an MLS degree from Columbia University and a PhD from Indiana University and has published on both British and US Labour History.

Deborah Osmond graduated with her Masters in Labour History at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia and is now pursuing doctoral studies in British History at York University in Toronto.

Isabelle Tombs studied history at the Sorbonne and Cambridge, where she did her PhD on Socialist Politics and the Future of Europe. She is now a Senior Lecturer at South Bank University. She is the author of articles in France and in Britain on socialist exiles in Britain, on European identity, on trade union policies and on Jewish issues.

Irene Wagner emigrated to the UK in 1938. After working as a Labour journalist's au pair, she married and joined her husband in confidential war work. She took up her interrupted librarianship after the war and was librarian until retirement to the Labour Party. She is active locally in education.

Christine Collette and Stephen Bird

There has been no history like that of the Jews. No other people can trace their chronicles back over thousands, let alone hundreds of years, nor, indeed, have influenced such a wide range of cultures during that time. The last hundred years have been especially significant in Jewish history. As one of their sons (albeit a prodigal one) remarked: 'There have been decades like centuries and centuries like decades'. Karl Marx could have added, in relation to the Jews of the twentieth century: 'and there have been centuries like millennia'.

In 1900 there was hope for the Jews. Starting to be accepted in Western European society, they contributed to its political and economic development. Even those refugees crammed into transatlantic steamers, fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe, could aspire to a new home in a democratic republic, large enough to absorb them, with a constitution which allowed them to campaign for their further freedoms. Others, however, were not content to find a place of freedom but aspired, like other captive peoples, such as the Poles and the Irish, to have a nation of their own. Zionism was no longer a prayer but a nationalist dream that could be fulfilled in their lifetime.

It was natural that not only were Jews inspired by, but that they initiated revolutionary and socialist ideas; not only did they participate in, but they led the early left-wing movements. Their messianic culture and their constant experience of religious oppression made such ideas more meaningful to them. Not all were Zionists by any means and to many this nationalistic concept contradicted the very basis of socialism. However, this debate was to be overwhelmed by the most significantly tragic event of the twentieth century. Anti-Semitic persecution was an ingrained part of their history, but never had it been so systematically undertaken and with such cold ideological clarity, as in the Third Reich. Auschwitz and Buchenwald made anti-Zionism seem anti-Semitic.