Exhibition folder
© Jewish Museum Vienna
Jewish Museum Vienna, November 11, 1994 - January 29, 1995
Proletarians and Revolutionaries
An Exhibition on the History of the Jewish Workers" Movement
The exhibition covers all aspects of this mass movement which comprised political parties, trade unions, educational and social institutions and, in the social and ideological sense, constitutes a multi-layered, sometimes contradictory complex. In the context of the movement, we find both poverty-stricken labourers and passionately committed intellectuals; on the political level, revolutionaries with internationalist tendencies were opposed by groups favouring a Jewish national solution. "Proletarians and Revolutionaries" explores the early history of the Jewish Workers" Movement and follows its further development until the eve of the Second World War by means of photographs, documents, films and other exhibits. The question of how to visualize the polemic clash of ideologies, the wealth of different organizations and the geographic scatter of the individual sub-movements rendered the representation of the history of the Jewish Workers" Movement extremely difficult. The Tel Aviv-based Beth Hatefutsoth Museum, which provided a large part of the material for the Vienna exhibition, therefore suggested to divide the exhibition into major sections which will be presented in a historical and geographic sequence. The exhibition will above all focus on Russia, Poland, Great Britain, the U.S. and Palestine; in addition, a special subsection will deal with the developments in Austria.
Curator: Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek
Exhibition design: Beth Hatefutsoth, Alexander Kubik