AI Summary
5 min readLeon Trotsky, the architect of the Red Army and a man who famously declared himself “neither a Russian nor a Jew, but a social democrat,” spent only ten weeks in New York City in 1917. Yet Yiddish newspapers plastered his face on front pages, calling him “the Russian Jewish revolutionary.” Meanwhile, Chaim Zhitlovsky, a PhD-holding theorist who spoke Yiddish with a sophistication no one in the city had ever heard, drew crowds by arguing that Jewish nationalism and socialist internationalism were not opposites but complements. In a lecture delivered at YIVO, historian Tony Michaels traces how these two figures—initially occupying opposing ideological poles—shifted in surprising ways with the rise of Nazism, and how their trajectories illuminate the narrowing of Jewish political possibilities in the first half of the twentieth century.
Two Revolutionary Styles, Two Theories of Jewishness
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Introduction and Speaker Setup** - Eddie Portnoy of YIVO introduces the topic and the speaker, Professor Tony Michels, setting the stage for a comparative analysis of two revolutionary Jewish figures.
- 2 (02:55) **Thesis: Two Revolutionary Jews, Divergent Paths** - Michels begins his lecture, framing the central puzzle: how Leon Trotsky and Chaim Zhitlowsky, who held opposing views on nationalism and socialism, nonetheless saw their positions converge and diverge in surprising ways over time.
- 3 (09:11) **Chaim Zhitlowsky: The Theory of Progressive Jewish Nationalism** - Michels details Zhitlowsky's arrival in the U.S. as an emissary of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and his revolutionary theory that integrated Jewish nationalism with socialism.
- 4 (16:08) **Zhitlowsky's Impact: The Embodiment of a New Jew** - Michels uses contemporary quotes to demonstrate the profound influence of Zhitlowsky's ideas and persona on the Jewish immigrant community.
- 5 (19:59) **Leon Trotsky: The "East Side Jew" in New York** - Michels shifts to Trotsky, who arrived in 1917 not as a party emissary but as a refugee, yet was immediately embraced by the Yiddish-speaking public as a Jewish hero.
- 6 (28:42) **Trotsky's Theory of Permanent Revolution** - Michels explains Trotsky's most original contribution: his theory of revolution developed in response to the 1905 uprising.
- 7 (32:29) **Trotsky as a Jewish Icon and a Target of Anti-Semitism** - Michels explores how Trotsky was perceived by Jewish and non-Jewish commentators during and after the Russian Revolution.
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Show Notes
When Jews plunged into the world of politics en masse at the beginning of the 20th century, a variety of new options were available to them. Two of the leading figures who proffered novel, but opposing political avenues to the Jewish masses were Dr. Chaim Zhitlowsky and Leon Trotsky. Zhitlowsky, a founder of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary party, offered a synthesis of socialism and Yiddish nationalism. Trotsky, a leading Russian Social Democrat, formulated a strict version of internationalism that left no room for Jewish national aspirations. Many Jews, however, did not view their political choices in such stark terms. Instead, they saw both men as leaders and thinkers who pointed the way to Jewish national liberation and working-class revolution, a Jewish homeland, as well as a flourishing life in the diaspora. In this lecture, Tony Michels will explore the political ideas of Trotsky and Zhitlowsky, and how Jews engaged with them during the first half of the 20th century.
This program is the first in a series of programs held in conjunction with YIVO’s current digitization of the Jewish Labor and Political Archives (JLPA). Consisting of nearly 200 collections encompassing 3.5 million pages of archival documents that were collected by the Bund Archives, the JLPA forms the world’s most comprehensive body of material pertaining to Jewish political activity in Europe and the United States.
This lecture originally took place on April 28, 2025.
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