Between nationalism and assimilation: Jewish antifascism in Australia in the late 1940s and Early 1950s

Abstract

This thesis argues that Jewish antifascism was a major political and cultural force in Australian Jewish communities in the 1940s and early 1950s. It charts the emergence of a non-nationalist and anti-assimilationist Australian Jewish antifascist political subjectivity, and examines its ideological basis, cultural and political practice, and the circumstances of the rapid demise of its hegemony. This thesis focuses on transnational dimensions of the political imagination and, while drawing on relevant historiography, also develops a partisan framework. It analyses the complex historical positioning of Australian Jews within Australian white supremacy and settler colonialism, and tracks the..