How Eastern European Jewish immigrants, modernist Yiddish culture, and anti-fascist politics dragged the Netherlands into the twentieth century.

My essay examines Yiddish-speaking immigrants in the Netherlands between the two world wars with a focus on Amsterdam, the Jewish center of the country. The Netherlands was never a major recipient of migrants of any kind, let alone Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Despite seeing the Netherlands primarily as a transit site, enough Yiddish-speakers stayed – either due to finding work in the country or because they failed to get entry papers to other countries – that they formed a visible presence in Amsterdam, The Hague, Scheveningen, and other cities across the country. Due to its small size and unstable immigrant population – since most immigrants did not plan on settling in Amsterdam – this community remained on the periphery of the global interwar Yiddish-speaking map. I argue that by being on the margins of the global Yiddish community Amsterdam's left-wing Yiddish-speaking community, organized around the Ansky Society, remained above the sharp politicized polemics that drove a wedge between communists and non-communist leftists in other Yiddish cultural centers not located in the Soviet Union. (There, the Communist Party's Evsektsiia had long ago ended public internecine debates.) I also show that Yiddish-speaking immigrants affected Dutch culture more generally. Because it operated in Yiddish, the Ansky Society was perceived to be marginal in the Netherlands. That marginalization allowed its members the political space (on the margins of both Dutch society and the global Yiddish-speaking diaspora) to advocate for international political positions that in any Dutch-language institution, Jewish or not, would have been considered too radical in a political culture that avoided extremes of any kind. The Ansky Society nonetheless served as the Netherlands' outspoken voice against the rise of fascism in all of its 1930s manifestations. Unlike the mainstream Dutch Jewish community, members of which enfranchised citizens and therefore deeply implicated in party politics and questions of loyalty, the Ansky Society had no such fears, because most of its members lacked citizenship. They were beyond (or perhaps beneath) questions of loyalty. Finally, the Ansky Society also publicly criticized the Dutch government's complacency in the face of fascism spreading across Europe. In other words, Amsterdam's Yiddish-speaking community in the interwar period was doubly marginalized – from global Yiddish culture and from Dutch politics – and was therefore politically empowered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]