Yuri Slezkine’s Undiscriminating Eye

Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three are likely to hold a more positive opinion of socialism than of capitalism, according to one recent survey. This statistic tracks with the enthusiasm for self-identified socialist politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or her fellow travelers of “the Squad.” Unsurprisingly, sizable numbers of young Jews have also joined the parade. Some have looked back to the high point of Jewish socialism in the form of the Bund: a Jewish, Yiddish-speaking socialist party in early-20th-century Poland and Russia whose annals included moments of heroism, tragedy, and, most appealingly to today’s leftists, anti-Zionism.

Today’s Jewish socialists can indulge this highly romanticized image of the past only with the aid of ignorance, not only about the Bund itself but also about two other projects in which Jews participated during the heyday of socialist zeal. One, an unqualified success, was the creation of the modern state of Israel. The other, a catastrophe, saw the ushering into being of the murderous totalitarian regime known as the Soviet Union. The shining record of the former is something that young Jewish socialists today either ignore or abhor; the brutal record of the latter is something that few seem eager to acknowledge, let alone reclaim.

Yuri Slezkine, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a fellow at the Hoover Institution, is free of such qualms. A prominent historian of the USSR whose 1994 essay on Soviet nationalities’ policy is (for good reason) the most downloaded article in the field of Slavic studies, Slezkine has been keen to tell the story of forgotten Jewish Communists, and to seek explanations for what he sees as nothing less than an ingrained modern Jewish enthusiasm for Communism itself. He did so first in The Jewish Century, published in 2004—when it received a number of awards—and recently reissued; and he returned to the subject in 2018 with The House of Government, a perhaps even more lauded book that is less about Jews per se than about the Communist-party elite in which so many Jews found a home.