Argentine and Uruguayan Communist Jews: From the Russian Revolution to the Anti-fascist Popular Front.

NERINA VISACOVSKY

Transnational Communism across the Americas

University of Illinois

Lugar: Illinois; Año: 2020; p. 170 - 190

Leftist Jewish immigrants who arrived in Argentina and Uruguay between the end of the 19th century and the Second World War came mainly from Eastern Europe. These were working families who spoke Yiddish and manifested a secular Judaism. Several had political experience in Marxist movements and brought their militant spirit to this new land. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, three political networks took shape within the culture of the Jewish Left in the Rio de La Plata: socialists of the Workers´ Party Bund; Marxist Zionists of the Linke Poale Sion Party; and the Leninist communists linked to the Komintern and the Argentine and Uruguayan Communist Party. These three groups were active founders of schools, theaters, publications, libraries, cultural centers, and sports entities. However, the most radicalized sector was the one concentrated under the Federation Yiddisher Kultur Farband (YKUF). Since 1935, when the 7th Congress of the Communist International called for the creation of Popular Fronts, this sector identified itself as ?Progressive Jews" (di progressive) and, in line with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, they fought against religion and Zionism throughout the twentieth century. This chapter contends that this identity, condensed under the Jewish antifascist and communist premises of the YKUF, was unconditionally faithful to the Soviet socialist system because it was born out of the influence of the October Revolution and the workers´ struggle, and became unbreakable during the Civil Spanish War and the Second World War due to the role of the Soviet Union against Fascism and Nazism.