Zionist Socialist Workers Party

The Zionist Socialist Workers Party was founded in late 1904 in Odessa. Its founding members were mostly young intellectuals with labor Zionist roots who sought to combine two ideological commitments: commitment to revolutionary Russian Marxism and the view that the only solution to the political, economic, and social plight of East European Jewry was a territorial solution; frustrated at what they saw as the reactionary and unrealistic romanticism that drove many Zionists to insist on the historic Land of Israel, the Zionist Socialists instead insisted that national as well as socialist reason dictated openness to any territory where large-scale Jewish resettlement would be possible. More fulsomely nationalist than the Bundists, they also insisted (like the Seymists) that Jews in the diaspora had the right (as did other ethnonations) to live an autonomous national life and to cultivate their own modern national culture. Taking an active role in Russia’s 1905 Revolution, the Zionist Socialist Workers Party grew to include some twenty-seven thousand members by 1906, making it the second-largest Jewish socialist party after the Bund. The party also published the weekly Der nayer veg (The New Way), which was shut down in 1907. The party drew together an especially talented group of figures who had forged innovative paths in Zionist activism previously, including the veteran socialist Zionist Nachman Syrkin and the pioneering young sociologist Jacob Lestschinsky. For reasons not so clearly linked to the party’s ideology, some of its leading figures soon came to play an outsized role as leading voices of modern secular-national Yiddishism in the coming decades; this was true of Lestschinsky, Ze’ev Latski-Bertholdi, and the pioneering champion of Yiddish modernist literature Shmuel Charney, who took the pen-name Shmuel Niger. With the fall of the tsarist regime in February 1917, the Zionist Socialist Party reemerged and became especially active in Jewish politics in Ukraine; that same year, it merged with the similarly reemergent Jewish Socialist Workers Party (Seymistn) to form the United Jewish Socialist Workers Party, or Fareynikte.