This brilliant collection of essays focuses on Jewish working-class politics in 1920s Belorussia. By concentrating on Jewish workers’ experience, Andrew Sloin offers a nuanced account of the experiences of pre-revolutionary Jews that moves beyond the wholly negative portrayal of Jewish life under the Soviet regime that dominates current historiography. He discusses various aspects of what he calls the “Jewish Revolution,” an activist, positive program for total economic, social, and cultural integration into a post-capitalist order devoted to social and national equality. The “Jewish Revolution” was based on Bolsheviks’ anti-racism and their notion of labor as the primary gateway to active citizenship in the new society. In practice, the new policies entailed a dramatic elevation in the status of Jewish workers, previously discriminated against due to their ethnicity as well as their poverty. As laborers, they became the most respected members of the new society, developed a deep sense of belonging in that society, and assisted by the new anti-racist state, created their own proletarian Jewish culture. The author also addresses the Soviet turn to less savory policies towards the Jews, in particular the gradual racialization of Soviet policies and blaming the Jews for the failures of Soviet economic policies, both during the NEP and following the Stalinist turn. Such racialization was never translated into racism per se, as happened in numerous other countries during the period between the two world wars. The state, however, continued to blame the “wrong” kind of Jews for the regime's failures, while encouraging active participation of the “right” kind of Jews—the communist Jewish workers.

In multiple essays, the author discusses the regime's establishment of certain groups of Jews as “wrong.” These were always reactions to a particular economic policy failure that pushed some Jews into socially undesirable economic or political roles. The government then blamed these Jews for its policy's failures. Self-employed artisans were designated as selfish, even though they were largely unemployed workers who lost their jobs due to government's economic policies. The party designated protesting Bolshevik workers, who were formerly members of other revolutionary parties or oppositional trends, as petty bourgeois and thus selfish in order to marginalize them and ensure that other workers would not protest against their lowering standard of living. Sloin concentrated on former Bundists and Trotskyists, among whom were many Jews. Former non-Bolshevik revolutionary party members, particularly Bundists and later Trotskyists, were politicized within the Communist Party, while workers, likely to protest against the state's anti-worker policies, were designated as petty bourgeois and thus, again, selfish. The accusation of selfishness was easy to make against those engaging in illicit trade and smuggling as a reaction to the scarcity of goods within the republic. In Belorussia, where before the 1917 Revolution Jews were major actors in trade, an attack on illicit traders was bound to be associated with an attack against Jews. All of these accusations and thus exclusions from the Soviet polity were allegedly never against Jews per se, but in practice always against groups where Jews in Belorussia constituted a substantial majority. This practice, which culminated with the Stalinist turn when the state no longer encouraged proletarian cultures of ethnic minorities and insisted on such minorities’ merging within what was perceived as the general Soviet culture, thus put an end to the “Jewish Revolution.” Still, while the racialization of policies and the blaming the Jews for the failures of the Soviet economy created severe interethnic tensions in Belorussia, the author points out that the sense of belonging that the Jewish workers developed during the earlier period never disappeared and was, in fact, encouraged by the regime.

These essays present an exceedingly well-researched, original, and highly-nuanced analysis of how even in a society committed to an anti-racist stance, an ethnic minority still faces discrimination due to pre-existing cultural perceptions. The author describes how each time the society experienced economic difficulties, Jews as a cultural idea were turned into scapegoats. Thus, individual Jews fighting for equality whether as Jews, as workers, or both found themselves designated as the “wrong” Jews of one sort or another—Bundists, Trotskyists, petty-bourgeois, or nationalists. Some Jews indeed were one or more of these, but this almost did not matter. The government found it useful to draw a connection between resistance to its economic policies and a despised ethnic minority, thereby marginalizing such resistance. The author did an excellent job in showing how the government achieved this outcome, while at the same time retaining its anti-racist image.