Writing the Paris Commune in the Warsaw Ghetto.

This article analyzes the rise and decline of discussions about the Paris Commune within the global Yiddish public sphere during the early twentieth century, highlighting how Jewish socialist authors used the Commune as a framework to interpret class struggle, anti-Jewish violence, and political oppression. The Paris Commune was portrayed as a symbol of internationalist working-class revolution, offering a critique of nationalist and bourgeois power structures within Jewish society and beyond. The article emphasizes Abraham Blum’s 1941 Warsaw Ghetto pamphlet, which linked the Commune’s class conflict and suppression to the Nazi assault on Jewish life, underscoring internal class divisions and collaboration within the ghetto under Nazi rule. Ultimately, the discourse on the Commune vanished after the Holocaust, reflecting the destruction of Yiddish revolutionary culture and its ideals of internationalism, democracy, and social emancipation amid the genocidal and ideological devastation wrought by Nazism.