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Marie Syrkin
Marie Syrkin (1899-1989) was an American author, translator, educator, and Zionist activist.
Born in Bern, Switzerland, she was the daughter of the Socialist Zionist theoretician ...view moreMarie Syrkin (1899-1989) was an American author, translator, educator, and Zionist activist.
Born in Bern, Switzerland, she was the daughter of the Socialist Zionist theoretician Nachman Syrkin and his wife Bassya Syrkin (née Osnos), a feminist socialist Zionist. The family immigrated to the United States in 1908, settling in New York City, where Marie attended public school. She received her bachelor’s degree and master’s degrees, in English literature, from Cornell University. In 1925 she became an English teacher at the Textile High School in Manhattan, a job she held for over two decades.
She visited Palestine for the first time in 1933 and also began to publish English translations of Yiddish poetry. In 1934, she was a co-founder and joined the editorial staff of the New York-based Labor Zionist journal Jewish Frontier, regularly publishing articles on Jewish cultural and political life, and current issues. She became the editor-in-chief in 1948, and continued to lead the journal for 25 years. She also wrote numerous articles for the New York Times and the Jerusalem Post. From 1937-42 she reported on the Nazi persecution of European Jewry, and advocated for the opening of Jewish immigration to British Mandate Palestine, and for the liberalization of the quota system that governed American immigration policy. Syrkin’s first book, Your School, Your Children, was published in 1944.
After the war, in 1947, she interviewed Jewish Holocaust survivors in displaced persons camps in Germany, on behalf of B’nai B’rith’s Hillel program, to recruit candidates for scholarships to American universities. She conducted interviews of Holocaust survivors in Palestine, which became the basis of her next book, Blessed Is the Match (1947).
In 1950 Syrkin was appointed associate professor of English literature at Brandeis University and retired as professor emerita in 1966. She died on February 2, 1989, aged 89.view less
Books by Marie Syrkin
Nachman Syrkin, Socialist Zionist: A Biographical Memoir and Selected Essays