American Jews, Communism, and Espionage

Tuition: $360 | YIVO members: $270**
 

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This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.

Instructor: Harvey Klehr

The relationship between American Jews and communism has long been a sensitive subject. Because Jews were overrepresented in the CPUSA, antisemites have frequently tarred them as subversive and un-American. That, in turn, raised Jewish fears when the Red Scare began in the late 1940s and many of those accused of being Soviet spies were Jewish.

This course will address these issues, beginning with the fraught relationship between Jews and the founders of the communist movement in Europe. It was an ideology that attracted large numbers of Jews and equally determined opposition from large sectors of the Jewish community–including many attracted to socialist ideas. The creation of the state of Israel intensified the Soviet Union’s hostility to Zionism and frequently morphed into antisemitism.

When the United States and the Soviet Union became antagonists after the end of World War II, the prominent role Jews played in the CPUSA became a major concern for mainstream Jewish organizations which feared that it would lead to a surge in antisemitism. That fear was heightened by the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 after their conviction for conspiring to steal atomic secrets, and the simultaneous exposure of widespread Soviet espionage directed against the United States that included a disproportionate number of Jews. Despite these fears and Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against communist spies, it did not lead to a spike in antisemitism.

We will examine these issues from a variety of perspectives and, where appropriate, draw some parallels to issues of antisemitism and Anti-Zionism today. For each class the instructor will suggest some short reading and offer some longer readings that participants might want to pursue on their own. Each session will typically begin with a lecture, but we will leave time for questions, discussion, and reflections.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.

Harvey Klehr is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History, Emeritus, at Emory University where he taught from 1971 to 2016 and served as chair of the Political Science Department. He was the Emory University Scholar-Teacher of the Year, received the Emory Williams Undergraduate Teaching Award, and served on the National Council of the Humanities. He is the author or co-author of 16 books and more than 100 articles, most dealing with American communism and Soviet espionage. Three of his books were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and he has written op-eds for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Mosaic and New York Review of Books.

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