This book tells the remarkable story of the efforts by leading Russian Jews to secure a Jewish homeland in the Soviet Union. Helped by an improbable alliance of Moscow revolutionaries and New York Jewish philanthropists, this attempt to remake a portion of Soviet Jewry into a prosperous peasant farmer class - and construct a nationality-based republic similar to other Soviet creations - gripped the attention of Jews everywhere.

The scheme failed, both in Ukraine and the Crimea, and ultimately led to the creation of the implausible "Jewish Autonomous Region" of Birobidzhan, an enormously distant, infertile, and gloomy piece of the Russian Far East. However, as an attempt to create a Soviet alternative to the Jewish settlements in Palestine and as a cautionary tale about policy-making in a multi-ethnic state, this remains a fascinating and (until now) oddly neglected area of Jewish history.