Book Reviews: Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. 250 pp

[...]Zaagsma directly seeks to entangle the histories of the Spanish Civil War and Jews’ participation in the International Brigades, writing, “the experiences of Jewish volunteers in the International Brigades were first and foremost past of the manifold histories of Jews and the Left” (7). Ultimately, Zaagsma's interrogation of the news media in 1930s Paris seemingly supports the longstanding historiography on Yiddish-speaking Jews in interwar France that has tended to focus on the various French Jewish communities’ political and cultural stratification. Gerben Zaagsma's Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War will be of interest to anyone in the field of Jewish studies working on Jews and war, Jewish communism and the Jewish Left more broadly, Yiddish culture, the Yiddish press, the Spanish Civil War, interwar France, as well as historical memory.