Such Stuff As Diaspora Dreams Are Made On: Birobidzhan and the Canadian-Jewish Communist Imagination

Abstract

This article examines the history of two organizations whose main aim was to provide support for the Soviet project to establish a Jewish socialist republic, the official language of which was to be Yiddish, in the Birobidzhan region of the USSR. ICOR was founded in 1924 and was active within the Jewish, immigrant, working-class milieu; Ambijan, in Canada called the Canadian Birobidjan Committee, was formed in the United States in 1934. Both groups were ideologically and organizationally tied to the Communist Party of Canada and operated for some three decades. They became ideologically marginal and politically irrelevant during the Cold War, especially after the Birobidzhan project was exposed as largely fraudulent. Both groups disbanded in the 1950s.