ABSTRACT

This chapter examines a political movement which combined elements of Marxist universalism and Jewish territorial nationalism. This grouping of hke-minded organizations, active mainly between 1917 and 1956, has been termed the Jewish communist movement. Throughout the Jewish Diaspora it maintained organizations tied to their respective communist parties and to the international communist movement. The ICOR stressed that a new Jewish national entity was being created. On 21 December 1924, at a conference held in New York City, the ICOR, its symbol a sickle superimposed on a sheaf of wheat, was founded by a group of Jewish communists and Left Poalei Zion. The social and economic foundations of the Jewish masses were being reconstructed along sound socialist lines; the new Jewish nation, a pearl of the Far East, would usher in a new epoch in Jewish history. The Soviets began to produce films about Birobidzhan as a means of appealing to American Jews.