Jews And Communism In South Africa – Part 3

Source : Cutting Through the Mountain – Interviews with South African Activists Edited by Immanuel Suttner (Viking-Penguin, England and USA 1997).

This book also appears to have been written for a Jewish readership. It is a thick expensively bound book of over 600 pages, financially supported by the Liberty Life Foundation created by the Jewish mega-capitalist Donald Gordon. Suttner says a disproportionate number of individual Jews played a part in transforming South Africa into a more just society. There are two streams : those who fought  within the system  as jurists, members of parliament, via the media, or in civil society, and those who entered  illegal organizations which were socialist, communist or mass-based in character.(p.2) He says the book  welcomes (these Jews) back not only as worthy South Africans, socialists, communists or liberals, but as worthy Jews(p.3). Some of the remarkable people(page vii) who are heroes of the book include :

Taffy Adler who was involved in the 1970s and ’80s in the ‘formation and consolidation of the black trade union movement’. His father was a Lithuanian Jew who emigrated to South Africa in 1926 and who ‘was tremendously loyal to Stalin and Russian communism’ right up to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. His uncle, Michael Harmel, became general secretary of the South African Communist Party.

Ray Alexander (Rachel Alexandrowich) arrived in South Africa from Latvia and joined the SA Communist Party five days later. She played a leading role in the organization of trade unions. She was married to Jack Simons, a ‘devoted communist’ and lecturer at the University of Cape Town.

Pauline Podbrey (Podbrez) born in Lithuania came to South Africa at the age of eleven. She joined the Communist Youth League, run by Max Joffe, and the related Labor League of Youth, run by Hilda Bernstein. Of the Communist Party she says ‘the majority of the members were Jewish looking back on it now, it seems as if everybody was Jewish.‘ (*p52). She married a prominent Indian trade unionist and Communist Party leader, resulting in her mother being ostracized by the South African Jewish community, although it has been and still is normal practice for this community to depict white non-Jews as despicable prejudiced racists.

Joe Slovo born in Lithuania, came to South Africa where he joined the Young Communist League at the age of sixteen. He became a central member of the Communist Party of South Africa and a ‘hard-line Stalinist’, becoming general secretary in 1986. He concentrated on building up Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC (African National Congress), becoming its chief of staff and head strategist in  ...

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