This collection of essays examines the politicization and the politics of the Jewish people in the Russian empire during the late tsarist period.

Part I. New Dynamics?: 1. Crisis as a factor in modern Jewish politics, 1840 and 1881-2; 2. Jewish politics and the press: the 'reception' of the Alliance Israelite Universelle (1860); Part II. Revolution and War (1905-21): 3. Jewish politics and the Russian revolution of 1905; 4. 'Youth in revolt': An-sky's In Shtrom and the instant fictionalization of 1905; 5. Yosef Haim Brenner, the 'half-intelligentsia' and Russian-Jewish politics (1899-1908); 6. The paradoxical politics of marginality: thoughts on the Jewish situation during the years 1914-21; Part III. Ideological Conflict and Continuity: 7. The socialist opposition to Zionism in historical perspective; Part IV. Overseas: 8. The 'Yizkor' book of 1911 - a note on national myths in the second Aliya; 9. The bundists in America and the 'Zionist problem'; 10. S. M. Dubnov: historian and ideologist; 11. Assimilation and the Jews in nineteenth-century Europe: towards a new historiography?