Reclaiming Jewishness as Alterity: A Review of the New Translation of “Our Comrade, Avreml Broide” | Jewschool

“In Your Comrade, Avreml Broide: A Worker’s Life Story (Wayne State University Press, November 2024), translator Annie Sommer Kaufman offers a fresh and vital glimpse into the vibrant lifeworld of early-20th-century American Jewish radicalism– with a lesson strikingly relevant for our moment…

With the onset of the second Trump administration, Avreml’s final exhortation to his comrades may well be addressed to us, as the conditions he faced– ascendant fascism, antisemitism and political repression, widespread exploitation and deepening class conflict– grow increasingly resonant with our own. Our task may be less to critically interrogate our distance from Avreml, and more to recover our proximity; to rediscover, in a new time, what Kaufman calls “some of the lessons and legacies that have been hidden by political repression and cultural assimilation”; to relearn, if we have forgotten, how to call him comrade.”

Read more at Jewschool.