The Radical Jewish Tradition Book Launch: Revolutionaries, Resistance Fighters, and Firebrands

The Peretz Centre is pleased to present, in partnership with Independent Jewish Voices Vancouver, the Vancouver launch of The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, Resistance Fighters and Firebrands (Verso, 2026) by Donny Gluckstein and Janey Stone, an inspiring account of Jewish socialist struggles against Tsarist pogroms, exploitative sweatshops, and murderous Nazis across three continents.

The Radical Jewish Tradition recovers some of the long-neglected history of Jewish resistance to oppression, highlighting radicals who forged solidarity with other oppressed groups and whose revived stories expand the limits of our historical imagination in a world in crisis.

Janey Stone will be in lively conversation with local writer and artist Jess Goldman. Books will be available for purchase from Massy Books.

Saturday, May 2, 2026

Doors open at 6:30pm (event starts at 7pm)

Gallia & Ben Chud Auditorium at the Peretz Centre

6184 Ash St., Vancouver, BC V5Z 3G9​

➤   How to Get Here / Building & Accessibility Information

Parking is available on the street or in the underground parkade.

Registration is required in advance as space is limited. Admission is by donation (recommended: $5, no minimum).

This event is organized by the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture in partnership with Independent Jewish Voices Vancouver, on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. Our doors are open to people of diverse cultures, beliefs, genders, and sexual orientation, and abilities.

The Book: The Radical Jewish Tradition

From the Tsarist Empire to Poland and Germany, from London to New York, working-class and socialist Jews and non-Jewish comrades on the left fought oppression and exploitation through numerous political forms, including anarchism, left Zionism, Bundism, and revolutionary Marxism. Though this radical tradition was ultimately checked by the callous indifference of capitalist governments to refugees and the horror of Auschwitz, its lessons must be passed on to inform working-class and anti-imperialist struggles today.

By engaging with this history through the words and lives of poets, revolutionaries, journalists, garment workers, and tenant activists, the authors analyze issues of Jewish identity along political, cultural and sociological lines in order to aid understanding of the claim that the state of Israel represents Jews everywhere, the approach of the left to "The Jewish Question," and the growth of the antisemitic far right.

Our Speakers

Janey Stone’s mother sought refuge in Australia from Polish antisemitism in the 1930s. Janey is a lifelong socialist and political activist; she has been a union delegate and participated in the student, anti-Vietnam war and women’s liberation movements. As an anti-Zionist Jew, she has written and presented about resistance to the Nazis in Germany and Poland, and by Jews, and many other topics including women workers, sexual politics, the Middle East, and the radical Jewish tradition. Janey is retired and lives in Melbourne (Australia). She has a leadership role in Interventions, Australia’s only independent not-for-profit radical publishing company.

• Book Review: "A Powerful Legacy of Struggle" (Jake Ehrlich, Against the Current: A Socialist Journal)

• Interview: "The Radical Jewish Tradition with Janey Stone" (Red Flag Radio)

• Interview: "The Radical Jewish Tradition" (3CR Radical Radio)

Jess Goldman is a writer, comic artist, and amateur puppeteer. Their writing has been published by Maisonneuve, CBC, and Room. Their short story "Tombstone of a Tsaddik" won the 2025 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. A graduate of the University of British Columbia's creative writing MFA program, their writing explores where Yiddishkayt and queer culture joyfully collide. (Bio buried beneath the bio: having written many of these little bios, Jess Goldman is less and less sure of who they really are — of the easy confidence of “is” versus “could be” or “in this current political climate”. Really, like every creature on this cruel and wondrous planet, they’re a million contingent things at once.)

Event image: In 1919-1920, tenants across New York City organized a wave of rent strikes, including the one pictured, in which 450 families living in Brooklyn formed a union and went on a rent strike after their corporate landlord tried to evict them (photograph published in the Daily News, September 6, 1919, via Wikimedia).