This was my precious book baby that I gave my life to for seven years. I learned Yiddish. I read

God knows how many a lengthy socialist texts in various languages. I went to Ukraine during the

Russian invasion and to Poland, to Latvia, to Lithuania. I buried myself in archives, including like family archives that no one else has

access to. And I wrote this book that's a tribute to the Jewish labor boon and also a tribute to

my great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort.

Hello and welcome to Wise. It's happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

You know, it's an interesting thing about the way history works and the way that ideological or religious or political movements work that things that start at the margins or start with a small group of people and then achieve some

sort of power, even dominance, you know, when you go back to the moments where it's in the margins,

it seems preposterous absurd that it would gain the power that it had. I mean, St. Paul,

you know, going around the Mediterranean, probably has no idea that this little religion that he's working on

is going to be the dominant force in Western history for literally millennia. And that's true of,

you know, when you study revolutionaries throughout the years, it's also true that, like,

sometimes the inverse happens. Sometimes incredibly powerful, profound, meaningful, ideological or political movements happen. And then they kind of go away and their history gets a little lost. So sort of they kind of get written out. This is true of a whole bunch of different movements that happen in the U.S., particularly true of like a bunch of spiritual movements that happened in the U.S. that were incredibly powerful at certain times in our history,

and then kind of dissipate and get lost.

And in some ways, those are some of the most interesting and important stories for understanding how history actually develops, because there's such a contingency to how these battles,

ideological, political, military battles happen.

But to go back and recover one of those histories, an ideological, political movement

from the past that didn't win out, is to also recover some possible future, some possible

path forward that, some path that wasn't taken.

And I kept thinking about that as I was reading

this incredible new book that is getting a lot of acclaim. It was very positively reviewed in New York Times.

It debuted at number four in the bestseller list. You may have seen it around because it is also so

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