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Fighting for Social Justice on Both Sides of the Mediterranean: Jewish Female Volunteers from Palestine in the Spanish Civil War

Fighting for Social Justice on Both Sides of the Mediterranean: Jewish Female Volunteers from Palestine in the Spanish Civil War Raanan Rein

The Spanish Civil War resonated across the world, including the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine. Despite widespread solidarity with the Spanish Republic, a near consensus existed among virtually all Zionist sectors against the enlistment of young volunteers to the International Brigades. Still, between 150 and 200 volunteers left Palestine for Spain, most of them members of the Palestine Communist Party (PCP). Fourteen of them were women.

This talk focuses on the life trajectories of several of these female volunteers in order to illustrate their motivations to join the International Brigades but also highlight international women’s participation in the Spanish war and its limits. Based on recently discovered  documents, it seems that at the current stage of the historiography of international volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, it is mostly documents held in private hands, rather than the already researched public archives , that can help us shed a new light on the experiences of foreign participants in the Spanish fratricide.

Bio: Dr. Raanan Rein is the Elías Sourasky Professor of Latin American and Spanish History at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of numerous books, including The Franco-Perón Alliance: Relations between Spain and Argentina and In the Shadow of the Holocaust and the Inquisition: Israel's Relations with Francoist Spain; and co-editor of Spain 1936: Year Zero and Spain and the Mediterranean since 1898. In 2016 he was a warded the title of Comendador in Spain's Order of Civil Merit, granted by King Felipe VI.

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