askchapo

Seconding Blackshirts and Reds out of those options!

It would be playing with fire to recommend Trotsky, but he was the most prominent Jewish Bolshevik and wrote about his experiences and political theory around them. Antisemites would constantly depict Trotsky as the face of communism with antisemitic caricatures and epithets, right up to the Nazis and their big bad enemy of "Judeo-Bolshevism". This could be an interesting topic to explore, as the Bolsheviks were in alignment with Jewish people and organized against pogroms and antisemitism and accordingly had prominent Jewish members. And antisemites seized on this and wrapped it into their conspiracy theories.

Reading a proper history of Jewish Bolsheviks might be a good primer. It will not challenge anything regarding Stalin, but that might be a good thing since they are already anti-Lenin. Making them soften their opinion of Lenin could be a good first step. For example, Lenin wrote specifically against the Zionist conception of Jews as a separate nationality and for full and equal integration, and was the first European country to guarantee equal rights for Jewish people. The Bolshevik approach to the Pale of Settlement wrt a Jewish nationality with Yiddish as an official language would be interesting for this group, as it demonstrates the commitment of Bolsheviks to fight antisemitism and support the USSR's Jewish population - and squaring this with Lenin's opinions on nationalism would require really thinking about the meaning of all these facts.

This would also provide a segue to eventually discuss Stalin, as he was more or less in charge of designing and implementing revolutionary and protective policies on national minorities. And these kinds of questions are very relevant for Stalin, who wrote the highly influential, "Marxism and the national question". This is a useful text to read as it debunks the Orientalist criticism of Stalin as a non-intellectual "ogre" that is a common trope in circles like this reading group and also sets up his pro-Jewish policies and eventual status as commisar of nationalities. There are even conspiracy theories about Stalin not writing it, as anti-Stalin groups prefer to pretend he was incapable of such thinking.